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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

If you take the time to create good content, take the time to share it well. There is no magic formula, only thoughtfulness + tools. Know the Flow is my approach to social media data flow. Over the next week I’ll be sharing some of my theory and tips that I touched on in a recent #SoSocial presentation. Consider this the starter pack. Tools & Theory for social media content distribution

Distribution Tools

Social Blogs

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations.The best part about all these new partnerships is that we’re about to see an entirely new way to search the web emerge. For quick real-time results, there will always be the major search engines and their more basic lists of tweets, but for true data analysis, we now have incredible new options like Ellendale and all the others.Within each category are conversation topics and sub-topics.any topical page on Ellendale returns an incredible amount of data. There are summaries provided from sources like Wikipedia, Freebase (an online semantic database),

Just when I thought Twitter could not possibly become any more ridiculous or meaningless, someone had to go and figure out a way.The people over at the Critical Media Lab in the University of Waterloo have gone somewhat loony and teamed up with a local Ontario dairy farmer to give 12 cows twitter accounts.Mad Cow strikes againThe bovines (sounds like a cool band name), with names like Jerry J Lo, Freeride Speedy, and Attention Please, have been given the chance to broadcast the ins and outs of their lactation cycles in 140 characters or less. So it may be more accurate and, ehem, a-moo-sing to say their teats have been given the tweets.

Read more at www.rcrwireless.com

Twitter was born as a text messaging service; tweets are 140 characters because that is the length of a text message, minus a few characters for the author’s name.Today, though, most people in the United States think about Twitter as a Web tool, and they use it either online or via smartphone apps.But Twitter has not forgotten about all the people in the world who do not have fancy phones. On Friday, the company announced that it had acquired Cloudhopper, a Seattle text-messaging start-up.There is “untapped potential” with Twitter text-message use “Mobile is clearly where the majority of usage will happen,” Evan Williams, Cloudhopper has already been working with Twitter to connect its service directly with mobile carriers around the world, in part so that users do not have to pay extra to send or receive text message tweets. Twitter has long had problems with this, and in the past has had to disable text messaging in certain countries because of high fees.Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

The unthinkable has happened: Twitter has decided to make money. Longtime users of the microblogging service, which for years has operated without a viable business model, are anguished at the prospect of paid ads appearing among their tweets. But advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter’s vast and ever-growing data store will be the true profit center, say company execs — both for Twitter and for independent developers.Exactly to what extent Twitter plans to make its data available to outside parties remains unclear, but the company’s APIs are already accessible for developers to access its services, and last October it signed deals with Google and Microsoft to allow tweets to appear alongside search results. Now Twitter is reportedly developing “analytical products” aimed at marketers who want to mine the Twittersphere for insight into public opinion about companies, products, and brands — and it’s encouraging others to do the same.Read more at infoworld.com

While the two sets are among those available for no charge, Infochimps sells the more in-depth and extensive datasets it’s derived from Twitter, proving there’s a continued marketplace for this sort of information. For $300 you can buy the dataset containing an hour-by-hour breakdown of the occurence of hashtags, URLs, and smileys in the 1.6 billion tweets created between March 2006 and March 2010. For $250 you can purchase a dataset extracted from those same 1.6 billion tweets with all mentions of stock tokens and related keywords.While information from Twitter has been culled to assess which websites we’ll like and which movies will perform well, analysis from Twitter and from the expanding social graph is really just beginning. Like, for example, the ability to track the time and mention of stock names. The new dataset of stock information offered by Infochimps hopes to demonstrate to the financial industry what the music and film industry already know: big data is a powerful prediction tool.See more at www.readwriteweb.com

The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP’s blog. JP also has a Twitter account, where he mostly seems to post links to his blog One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album… and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album. Someone — and it’s not at all clear who — apparently filed a DMCA claim over the Twitter message about the leak, and Twitter responded by taking down the tweet and sending JP a note: jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT): Hello, The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice: Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 — New Post: Leaked: The National — High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/ Twitter is receiving a takedown notice (in theory) from the copyright holder, and Twitter is merely responding to that takedown and notifying the user. Second, JP claims that he only linked to Amazon and not to a download, but looking at his blog post, there are two clear links to a single song from the album — one at Mediafire and the other via Box.net. He makes no claim that these are authorized, so perhaps they are potentially infringing, which makes things a bit messier. It is true that his main link is to Amazon, encouraging people to purchase, but there are those MP3 links as well (though, again, only to a single song, not the whole album).Read more at techdirt.com

In fact, judging by Twitter’s Trending Topics, the re-tweeting process does not point to either good, or important content. Of course, it may not be right to assume that a global brain will be smarter, and real significance will be lost in the tsunami of celebrity drivel.Amplify’d from docs.google.comBut recent evidence in neuroscience shows the truth is actually an interested twist on this idea - a twist that could have important implications as a model of how global consciousness could emerge from real-time social media like Twitter.In reality, synapses are modified according to a rule called Spike Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP).   In a nutshell, STDP says that if two neurons fire (= spike) in rapid succession, the  connection from the one that fires first to the one that fires second will be strengthened.users could be automatically steered towards following folks who are the first to post content that will interest them - towards those who are considered the ‘thought leaders’ you might say.  And content creators who work hard to be the first to find and tweet interesting content will be rewarded automatically with a growing list of followerscontent generators on Twitter will compete to be the first to create good content or break important news

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.

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

Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo today announced it will develop with Twitter a set of new mobile services for its domestic customer base of 58 million. Under the deal, Docomo plans to integrate a “touch and follow” app into NFC-equipped feature phones, allowing two users to start following each other just by placing their handsets together. Docomo also says it will integrate tweets and other content from Twitter into the search results on i-mode, its web portal for feature phones starting this summer (50 million subscribers), and on the so-called “docomo market” portal for smartphones in late 2010 or early 2011. What’s most interesting though is what Docomo hasn’t officially announced but what The Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business daily, is reporting today. According to the paper, Docomo entered a licensing agreement with Twitter to harvest “masses of tweets” in Japanese for a new type of location-based service for smartphones.

The latest wave of social networks document, photograph and broadcast your every move, opening an unprecedented opportunity for small businesses and big brands alike to target consumers based on their whereabouts and activities.Local Response wants to help businesses collect and respond to their customers’ public posts. The platform scans Twitter for explicit checkins to locations, like on Foursquare, as well as natural language that indicates location (ex. “I’m going to…”), and responds with Twitter @mentions on behalf of businesses. Messages most often include a coupon or offer in a bit.ly link.In other words, when customers check into a store on Foursquare, the store can send them a coupon while they are there. If customers tweet a photo through Instragram from a competing store, they might get the same coupon.

The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects having an Internet presence. We're not just talking about your computer, laptop, cellphone or even your TV here - we're talking about everything. This includes your light switches, your fridge, even your toilet.With an Internet presence, all of your devices can start talking to each other and reacting to each other.Imagine a house that detects that a toilet hasn't been flushed for two days. It uses this to assume that the owners must be on vacation, but notices they left their heat cranked up to 22C, their TV running and all their lights on.Automatically, it adjusts all of these to an appropriate state (that might have pre-defined for being on vacation), and sends a text message, tweet or email to let the owners know. A text from the owners in return, or a tweet with #LightsOn, and the house will respond.

A lot of what is being done right now is by interested DIY (do-it-yourself) programmers and hobbyists through sites such as ThingSpeak.com and Pachube.com. It's a world of experimentation, twittering toilets, and home energy monitoring.