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Twitter offers a great way to get your information spread far and wide: the retweet.

Making Re-Tweet Ready Posts Make sure your post info has room for your original info plus a retweet. If your original post is close to 140 characters, the person retweeting has to edit your post to send it back out. Smells like work? People won’t make extra effort to retweet you if they have to edit your posts. Make sure you use URL shorteners like bit.ly or is.gd or ow.ly (there are dozens) to get back more of your real estate. If you’re going to tweet a URL, give folks a sense of what they’re clicking into. For instance, I use (video) or (youtube) when pointing to a YouTube video. And make sure you use (NSFW) on things that are Not Safe For Work. The more helpful or entertaining your tweet, the more likely people will take an action. The more jumbled with @ names and multiple urls and hashtags your tweet is, the less likely it will be retweeted. People will gladly retweet causes (unless you fatigue us). Starting a tweet with an @ means that a good chunk of folks won’t see it.

Retweet other people and promote other people 15x to every 1 time of your effort. Don’t tweet every damned thing you write about or do. Folks will fatigue quickly. Befriend and add value to the best retweeters. It’s a live network, a human network, a give-and-take relationship. That’s it. That’s how I do it. What about you? How are you getting it done? Photo credit Mike Baird ShareThis Tags: communication, howto, socialmedia, twitter ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks. With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before. Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme! Seriously, you’ll love it. Check out the Thesis demo site See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase

It’s a good question: archiving all of Twitter - can any sense be made of it when the context has passed?

Hence the decision by the Library of Congress last week to store the complete archives of Twitter. Starting six months from now, every last tweet—currently produced at a rate of 50 million a day—will be saved on an LoC hard drive and will presumably be accessible to historians for … well, forever.

But the decision to archive Twitter takes digital preservation to a new level of detail. In the past, all archives, even digital ones, had to be selective.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Facebook (note: I do think there are good things) is that most users seem utterly unware of the way Facebook is changing things; unaware of FB’s ever-changing Privacy settings; little idea about how expansive the recent f8 announcements could be (in fact I’d say a huge percentage of users don’t even know what the heck f8 is or what its impact may have); and perhaps wholly uprepared when their profiles and their data are streaming out in the open publicly. Most users are using FB strictly to post pictures and update their status in the literal way in which FB was designed - no sense of re-purposing the software in broader ways. On one hand, it’s great that we can all share our experiences with each other; on the other hand it’s worrying that more users aren’t educated enough about the fundamental nature of these media to make smart connections back to their own lives.

Furthermore, if Facebook becomes the primary place where people congregate, purchase, publish and share, it will become imensely important that users are proficient and savvy and creative in using it *for* their interests as citizens and not against them. The smallest tweaks in any software can have major implications in their use. Imagine if Facebook had a Hate button. I agree with Scoble: I hope we never see something like that. …But I have a feeling, there’s a Hate button hidden deep within our collective social experience and dynamics just waiting to surface its ugly head in the not-too-distant future. Recommend on Amplify                

Currency: A formal system for shaping, enabling, and measuring currents (or flows)Currencies involve a number of functions, each of which can be modified independently: unit of measure, store of value, token of status, medium of exchange, etc. Monetary Currency or Money is just a common way of bundling those functions as a medium of exchange for a commercial economy. It is a minuscule part of the full spectrum of possible currencies. In this expanded sense, currencies are tools for seeing and changing flows.One specific way we use them is to create collective intelligence at the level of our social entities and institutions. At the individual level, we see humans born, growing, learning, walking around and dying. However, the state “sees” humans created through birth certificates, their activities and accounts woven together by social security numbers, their communication patterns via cell phone bills, and their discorporation via death certificates.Read more at newcurrencyfrontiers.com 

In the tradition of much post-Modern theorizing, “augmented reality” offers a new conceptual paradigm, seeking to implode/queer/do category work on the real/virtual dichotomy and make room for a more flexible understanding of social media that allows for recursivity between these two concepts.  A person embedded in augmented reality is a cyborg in the Harawaysian sense.  For this reason, the editors of this blog have proposed – somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that our research is best understood as “cyborgology.”  In augmented reality, the culture is hyper-literally super-imposed on the material.  Our bodies and all other objects in the world become canvases for the digital and its rapid circulation of signs and symbols.  In Bauman’s term, everything becomes a conduit of Liquid (post-)Modernity.  However, the symbolic order expressed through the digital does not emerge out of nothing; it is a reproduction or extension of what has always existed.  The digital and material are always in circulation and neither can be abstracted from the new order of social relations.  That is to say, society is neither online or offline; it is augmented.  Thus, augmented reality and the cyborgs who populate it are now the proper objects of sociological inquiry.

three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.

Bill Keller of the New York Times has just written a provocative piece lamenting that new technologies are eroding essential human characteristics. I would certainly agree that almost all technologies, especially those with a cognitive element, transform the way we organize, value and manage our intellectual and social lives–-indeed, such complaints were raised, most famously by Plato about how writing was emptying words of their soul by disconnecting them from their living speakers. However, Keller makes not one but at least three distinct claims in his piece. I want to primarily discuss the one that he makes least explicitly and perhaps has never formulated directly himself.

first, let’s clarify the other two which are explicit.

First Keller talks about how we no longer need to remember everything and how his father used to use a slide rule and now there are calculators and who knows their multiplication table anymore… This is a familiar argument from cognitive replacement and I believe it is worth discussing not necessarily because there is something inherently wrong with machines making certain cognitive tasks easier, but I do deeply worry about what this means for valuing humans. Cheaper computers increasingly capable of taking over human tasks means that we face a profound human problem: how will we deal with the billions of people who will be potentially redundant if the only way of measuring a human’s worth is their price on the labor market? For me, this is an important political question rather than a technological lament. It’s not about what machines can do, it’s about the criteria by which we judge the worth of our fellow human beings, and how advances information technology increasingly leads us to devalue each other

With a pool of nearly 1,000 college students in ten countries over five continents – including the US, the study sought to witness the effects of abstaining from social media and ALL media for a period of 24 hours.

The word “addiction” while not clinically relevant was surely on the minds of the students as this word came back repeatedly in responses. “I was itching, like a crackhead, because I could not use my phone.” – US studentFacebook is the social media “drug” of choice. “There is no doubt that Facebook is really high profile in our daily life.” – Hong Kong studentBut “Texting is the glue of social life.” “I found it hard not to text my boyfriend as I am so used to doing that as our main way of communicating during the day.” – UK studentA sense of isolation and loneliness came over many. “When I couldn’t communicate with my friends by mobile phone, I felt so lonely as if I was in a small cage on an island.” – China student Envy led to hostility. "I realized that I was having hostile thoughts towards those students who were walking around texting. I was jealous of them and it literally felt like some sort of withdrawal.” – US student

My first reaction after reading over all of the findings was ‘I think much of this is applicable to ALL social media and media users as a whole.’

Wal-Mart’s social and mobile plans are starting to take shape only two months after acquiring Kosmix of Mountain View, Calif.

When Kosmix was purchased, it was building a database called the social genome project, which kept track of what people were interested in and what products people were talking about.

the executives say they are hard at work defining how the mega-retailer — with $419 billion in sales and 1.5 billion online visits a year to its Web site — will address the two very disruptive platforms: social and mobile.

New research by electrical engineers at Oregon State University has confirmed that an electronic technology called "ultrawideband" could hold part of the solution to an ambitious goal in the future of medicine -- health monitoring with sophisticated "body-area networks."

Such networks would offer continuous, real-time health diagnosis, experts say, to reduce the onset of degenerative diseases, save lives and cut health care costs. Some remote health monitoring is already available, but the perfection of such systems is still elusive

"This type of sensing would scale a monitor down to something about the size of a bandage that you could wear around with you," said Patrick Chiang, an expert in wireless medical electronics and assistant professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "The sensor might provide and transmit data on some important things, like heart health, bone density, blood pressure or insulin status," Chiang said. "Ideally, you could not only monitor health issues but also help prevent problems before they happen. Maybe detect arrhythmias, for instance, and anticipate heart attacks. And it needs to be non-invasive, cheap and able to provide huge amounts of data.

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.

A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.

By nearly every indicator, Russians are embracing social and digital media in ways deeper and more impactful than most other countries around the world. For those looking to do business in the former Republic, significant opportunities now exist to leverage this new wave of social adoption.

Consider that in the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly. Nearly three-quarters of those making the switch from homegrown social platforms such as Vkontakte (with tens of millions of members) to Facebook are under 27, signaling a generational desire to engage in global communities and interact with brands, celebrities, friends and politicians in decidedly new ways. Twitter usage, while still in its infancy in Russian, grew three-fold in 2010.

And while it should come as little surprise that nearly 80% of the Russian population owns a mobile device, the dramatic adoption of smartphone technology and advanced mobile usage are beginning to change the way in which businesses — and the government — communicate. According to Nielsen, Russians under 24 are the third-largest users worldwide of “advanced mobile data,” behind only China and the United States.

while workers want autonomy and flexibility, they also want social connection. In an interview, Yosh Beier of Collaborative Coaching summed this up, saying, “people want to have control over the where and when of their work experience, but they don’t necessarily want to isolate themselves.” How will this tension be resolved in the future?

Many point to technology to keep people connected across physical distance, tools “that will make the remote less remote,” in Beier’s words. He points to the mania for Foursquare in the consumer space as an example of people who are physically distant but use tech to “locate themselves.” The same is true for Facebook, which provides a virtual social connection and is a bit like a remote social gathering. Beier sees this trend of using tech to overcome the social isolation of web-enabled distance moving from consumers to web workers:

But instead of substituting virtual spaces for real ones (the Matrix model), some folks are focusing on substituting virtual selves for physical presence and meeting in real spaces (the Avatar model). Just look at our recent piece on robot avatars you can send to work or events in your stead and control over the Internet. Commenters on the post were skeptical, but Trevor Blackwell, CEO of Anybots (he’s also a partner in Y Combinator), which makes the robo-avatars pictured above, insisted in an interview that the idea wasn’t science fiction:

What will it take for mobile augmented reality to become mainstream? Big brands are starting to experiment with AR features in their own apps and partnerships with startups such as Layar, Wikitude and Metaio, but there was a strong sense at yesterday's AR Summit conference in London that much work remains to be done to take the technology beyond early adopters."One of the worst things about this industry is the name," said Nick Brown, chief executive of AR technology provider Crossplatform. "Augmented reality? What does that mean to the public?"Layar's AR strategist King Yiu Chu suggested that the key may be a shift in the way people think about AR. "Augmented reality is not a technology: it's part of everyday life," he said. "It will be embedded in televisions, cars ... everything that has to do with vision. You don't want to be aware of that, you just want to experience."

Focus has been largely placed on volume and reach of an individual’s ideas versus the implications of their actions. We’re so focused on growing our own brands that the megaphone has become more important than the message.

The Whuffie Manifesto further states that “when reputation is wealth, only those who do good and well unto others are the richest.”

Sites like DailyFeats have created models in which people self-badge positive actions that then aggregate their overall “Life Score,” which CEO and co-founder Veer Gidwaney says “is a reflection of the good that you do every day.”

John Jainschigg, Virtual event, 3D, web, social media,...

I've been reading Jane McGonigal's 'Reality is Broken,' and despite my agreeing with much of her thesis, I think she omits confronting a few troublesome ideas about gamification that _some_ (by no means all) game developers find chilling. For example:

- The emotional complex she wants to evoke through gamification is the same potent combination of intense engagement, flow, esprit-de-corps, loop-reinforced sense of accomplishment (fiero) and surrender to a higher purpose that inflames all True Believers. I'm not sure how you can seriously talk about gamification at world-changing scales without thinking about how scary the present crop of True Believer games can be (e.g., Unbridled Capitalism, Globalization, the Tea Party, Al Quada, etc.)

The traditional internet is oriented towards person-to-person connection, whereas the Internet of Things is oriented towards connection of inanimate objects. As such, the Internet of Things covers a larger range of connections and involves more semantics. Internet and telecom networks are focused on information transfer, while the Internet of Things is focused on information services. By combining sensor networks, the Internet, telecom networks, and cloud computing platforms, the Internet of Things can sense, recognize, affect, and control the physical world. The physical world can be unified with the virtual world and human perception. This opens a whole new media market yet to be explored to see which is the killer applications.

Sparks are a very simple taxonomy right now, but do have persistent URIs, which you can find by hovering over a Spark and looking in the left of the status bar at the bottom of your screen.

This warrants more dissecting and attention. Will they eventually use all or some of the hierarchy of Google Directory? Will they become hierarchical? Will the algorithm improve as we click on links that interest us? Can we add our own information? Are we creating new entities for Google as we search for and add Sparks to our items of interest – it seems that way. It’s not an ontology yet, but it’s a start. Lots of people creating persistent URIs for entities they’ve dreamed up – I hear that evil cackle again!

Google, by nature of its founding, is in a prime position to address the challenges that many enterprise technologists have when thinking about semantic data – how do we handle unstructured data? We have metadata: in schema, in taxonomies, in ontologies even. We have loads of content. With no metadata. How do we get them together? We can’t afford to hire a small army of indexers to apply the metadata to the content. The system metadata is insufficient and poor. We have a pretty good search tool, and have put some effort into data dictionaries, entity extraction and rules-based classification. We have tools that do latent semantic indexing and latent semantic analysis.  Make sense of unstructured information? Sure, Google can do that. Hopefully they will not reduce efforts in these areas too much to focus on other projects. Many of us can execute a search and return nothing useful; crowdsourcing tagging in G+ may re-vitalize  components of the search algorithm.

Every summer, fifty fifth graders converge on Manhattan for a week-long game design camp called Mobile Quest and magic happens.

A game is a complex system. It is a miniature world, in many ways analogous to the world we live in. The game occurs in a space or setting. It has its own physical laws or rules. It engages people or players, who generate outcomes by making choices and taking actions. Learning occurs largely by trial and error, and through this learning a clear goal or goals emerge. There is a sense of progress, a system of feedback, incentives, reward, punishment, reputation. The only difference is that the game world has been 100 percent designed, and it is an experience players can choose to walk away from. This means game designers must capture and retain players' attention and interest quickly.

But points and badgest are a very basic “carrot” approach. Pink says that in the main carrots and sticks don’t work except for basic repetitive tasks where there is little intrinsic motivation.

For anything involving knowledge or creativity, what matters is: Autonomy – deciding how and when to do things Mastery – the reward in gaining a skill and learning Purpose – the sense that the task is part of a greater goal.

What concerns me is that points and badges are none of the above, they are just  extrinsic motivation.

QR code technology arrived late to North America for numerous reasons, and with Near Field Communication (NFC) fast emerging, it is a valid concern that it may not tip the adoption needle in time to establish itself as a household communication tool.

With the release of the Google Wallet, Google has been building a lot of support for NFC. This may explain why they replaced QR codes with NFC for Google Places. Another reason may be because the stickers they distributed to the retailers were intended to be permanent, in which case NFC makes more sense. They may be a bit ahead of the market on this, but if they are distributing millions of these stickers across North America, it pays to plan ahead. Following their announcement, a vast number of articles surfaced with some variation of “QR codes are dead”. This in my opinion was a bit excessive considering Google Places is the only implementation where they made the changeover.

Getting away from Google, let’s briefly look at the expected rate of NFC adoption. Smartphones have been available on this continent for at least 4 years and they currently hold approximately 33% of the market. Google’s Nexus S is one of the first phones to be available with NFC technology and it was released only this spring. Blackberry will start releasing models this fall, and Apple has yet to confirm whether they will include NFC support in the iPhone 5. It’s not unreasonable to expect NFC gaining mass adoption no sooner than 2-3 years.