On social networks, it’s tempting to try and grow your network rapidly by accepting any friend requests that come your way and building a network of strangers. As Louis Gray explains, when thinking about business networking; revenue is only going to come from a small selection of your online community. For that reason, building a network of highly engaged people with whom you have a genuine connection can prove to be a great way to unlock business opportunities.

It’s easy to judge someone’s social media “usefulness” on their number of friends or followers, or assume that low numbers equates to a small and relatively useless network. But it might be sensible to start slowly and focus on quality. What do you think?

On his blog, Louis Gray spills the beans on stealthy start-up work he’s been doing the past few months. He is a Managing Director of New Media for Paladin Advisors. Here’s the description of Paladin Advisors:

Paladin Advisors Group is a strategic advisory firm for startups and enterprise companies who are looking for guidance in their marketing, public relations, sales processes, customer influence, Web and social media.

While Louis focuses on web-based social apps in his blog, his work with Paladin includes the enterprise.

For enterprise companies, my focus has been on integrating social media and blogging into their strategies, aligning on messaging with PR, marketing and customer service.

Congrats to Louis, and I love to see him diving into the start-up world himself. The Paladin site is under development, but you can follow Louis (@louisgray) and Paladin (@paladinag) on Twitter.

While it may not have carved out the giant slice of the social media pie that Twitter has, FriendFeed  has something truly exceptional: The individuals who make up the FF community. It is a community that is largely comprised of  good-hearted, wicked-witted and fierce-brained souls who are deeply loyal to each other.

That FriendFeed is special is something I firmly believe — even as a former member of that particular community. (A status revealed in the interest of full disclosure. Similarly, it should be noted that my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the service or the other folks using it. If you have a year where two people to whom your family is close die in rapid succession, you too might consider spending much more time connecting with those important to you face-to-face as opposed to screen-to-screen.)

But that community is also one that has been feeling more than a little worried ever since Facebook bought up FriendFeed, a feeling perhaps best summarized at the time it happened in this witty yet wise post by Louis Gray.

Thus, it is completely understandable that the community took some offense to Robert Scoble’s comment on the current state of FriendFeed the other day. If someone hurts your friends, you get angry. You defend your friends. Simple as that. And that’s just what people did – some eloquently and some in a more brusque manner. But the reactions to Scoble’s comment that can be glimpsed below the initial post demonstrate what is best about FriendFeed – it is an excellent forum for rapid interchange and discourse rather than just a way to broadcast your own “look at me, look at me!” message. (I’m looking at you Twitter.)

It seems unlikely that Scoble realized quite how disrespectful the tone of his comment seemed or how massive the impact of one of FF’s foremost cheerleaders seemingly turning on it would be — though he almost certainly has an inkling of it now.

Consider the impassioned and articulate response to Scoble crafted by FFer Lindsay Donaghe:

“<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>”

How many other online communities would inspire commentary with that much depth of feeling and intelligence behind it?

I was listening to Guy Kawasaki when he recently visited Bangalore and gave a few talks and a workshop on Twitter. One question that often pops up is how Guy manages to follow 180,000+ people. His simple answer was that he does not follow their public time line. I understand that because even with less than 2000 people, I have trouble keeping up.

What Guy actually does is track mentions of a few phrases including his name and direct messages. This reduces the load some what but it can still be considerable.

So let us take a hypothetical scenario. I want a piece of information to be propagated to 20 of the top tech bloggers who are actively interested in a specific subject area.  I can’t see anyway this can happen reliably through Twitter. We don’t know how they sample messages. We don’t know how frequently they follow their public time line. We cannot mention all of them in the Tweet. Many of them (understandably) hate to be directly messaged. So how do we really reach them?

This report on Information Diffusion provides some ideas on  how information propagates through Social Media.

“Those who respond very quickly to e-mails, technology addicts who are always connected, are the ones responsible for spreading certain rumors or campaigns quickly via Internet,”

if information is so interesting that it reaches many people, the diffusion is faster because these people quickly forward the message. This explains why some computer viruses quickly spread via e-mail in a matter of hours, despite the fact that the email response time is one day. However, if information is not so interesting, the diffusion is slower because it is controlled by those persons who take a long time to respond; this causes some rumours or bits of information to remain dormant in social networks a long time after they are released.

Will lists alter this? May be. It depends on the patterns of use. I think we still have a lot to study on how to effectively communicate marketing messages on Twitter and reach the right people.

A lot of men were drafted during World War II. Roy Rogers was one of them. With a 1-A classification, he expected to be shipped out in the spring of 1945. Consequently, screenwriter John K. Butler (working from a story by Leon Abrams) came up with a script to showcase Rogers’s leading lady, Dale Evans. When V-E Day rolled around, however, the draft board exempted men over the age of 30 who had children, so Rogers never had to serve. Director Frank McDonald’s Sunset in El Dorado ended up starring both “The King of the Cowboys” and “The Queen of the West,” but Evans is still the central figure, and it’s a great showcase for her sunny persona.

The film begins in the present day. Evans plays a young woman named Lucille Wiley, who works for a company called “Worldwide Tours.” In the first scene, Lucille shows a filmstrip that illustrates everything visitors will see on their western tour package. As shots of a ghost town appear on screen, Lucille says, “And this is El Dorado, in its day a roaring boomtown. The Golden Nugget, El Dorado’s most famous, or infamous, fandango hall. In its day, it rivaled the halls in Dodge City or the notorious Barbary Coast. The legendary Kansas Kate was the feature attraction here. And what a colorful attraction she was.”

Although she has a good pitch, and Kansas Kate was Lucille’s grandmother, Lucille has never been west of Hoboken. In a fit of pique, she runs off on one of Worldwide’s tour buses, determined to see the little town of El Dorado. She’s having a grand old time, singing “Go West Young Man” with her fellow passengers (Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers), when her drippy fiancé Cecil Phelps, the president of Worldwide Tours (played by Hardie Albright), and her old-maid aunt Dolly show up to spirit her away. Cecil intends to marry Lucille immediately, in Yuma, but she desperately wants to see El Dorado.

Their car breaks down on the way, and any hope Cecil has of making Lucille his wife pretty much falls off a cliff when Roy Rogers and Trigger ride up to help. He finds Lucille, off on her own, and says to her, “Well, I’ve seen mirages before, but this is the first one that ever talked back. Are you a mirage?”

Trigger tows their car to the nearest town, which happens to be El Dorado. Once there, Lucille explores the remains of the Golden Nugget and discovers a painting of Kansas Kate hanging above the bar. She’s interrupted by an ornery old coot named Gabby (George “Gabby” Hayes) who’s been dropping by the saloon for 40 years to make sure nothing happens to the painting. As Lucille stares at the picture and fantasizes about what her grandmother’s life might have been like, the movie flashes back to the old west, but the narrative continues, as everyone has a counterpart. Evans plays Kansas Kate, Rogers continues to play that character called “Roy Rogers” he played in so many movies, Gabby plays his younger self, and Cecil the drip becomes Cyril the heavy.

The plot moves at a brisk pace, and hinges on the coded map to Gabby’s gold claim being stolen by a group of bandits. Roy suspects that Kate was behind the plan, especially since she originally told him she was a schoolteacher, not a saloon owner, in order to impress him.

After Roy slugs it out with the toughest guy in the bar, a heavy named “Buster” (Roy Barcroft), he takes over Buster’s position as Kate’s bodyguard. Apparently his first duty as her bodyguard is to perform “Belle of the El Dorado” with Kate and her backup singers in a fully choreographed number.

The romantic scenes between Rogers and Evans are, as always, sweet and believable. After they take a break from riding together, she asks him, “What I can’t understand is why you took this job in the first place, particularly when you thought I swindled old Gabby out of his gold mine.”

“That’s why I took the job, to find out if you did,” he responds.

“Did you find out yet?” she asks.

“Oh, just a hunch, that’s about all,” he says, chewing on a piece of alfalfa and smiling.

I won’t be giving anything away if I tell you that everything turns out all right for Roy, Dale, Gabby, and Trigger, both in their present-day incarnations and their rootin’ tootin’ old-west versions. The only question I was left with was, since Lucille looks exactly like Kansas Kate, her own grandmother, and Roy looks exactly like the old-west character “Roy Rogers” who presumably married Kate, does that mean that the modern-day Lucille and Roy are actually cousins? Well, probably not, but it couldn’t help but cross my mind.

And that includes me. No, I do not have a Google Wave invitation yet. I have put in my application, pleaded with my friends, and even considered eBay (no, not really on that last one). I can’t give you the hands-on review from the legal mindset that you all are looking for. Not yet, anyway.

What I can do is provide you with some context if you are like me and have heard all about it, have gotten all excited to try it, but wonder what the heck it is and why should you even care.

Because I haven’t done the hands-on, I can only provide you with the  information I have culled from others among the scores and scads of on-line articles about it. Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft need only hiccup to cause a social media riot. Wave is no exception, and maybe is even more tantalizing in that it has been the subject of the months of hypeof tsunami proportion leading up to the limited edition 100,000 or so special, closed pre-beta invites that started trickling out last Thursday.

From Anthony Ha - Digital Beat

What IS it? At the core, Google Wave is a tool for online collaboration via real-time communication. According to the official Google word, the “communication” can be viewed as both a “wave” of conversation or a document. The participants in the wave or collaboration can utilize all sorts of media in the course of the conversation, offering rich, real-time sharing opportunity. Check out this screenshot of a wave here:

As you can see, waves look like threaded conversations, rather than the more traditional “back-and-forth” email model. Waves can constantly “crash” into your inbox, particularly if your box is open to all. Like a surfer confronted with too many possible rips, Google Wave certainly bears the potential to overwhelm the typical end user.

Another aspect that makes waves somewhat unique in the sharing world is their easy modification by participants, their ability to be played back at any time so that a new participant may be brought up to speed, and their fast transmission of information – you can see the other wave participants responses as they type them! The collaboration is real-time as well, due to some fancy “concurrency control technology” tools. Natural language features provide context and spelling correction. And, waves are embeddable, offering the ability to place the conversation and collaboration anywhere. Waves are amenable to the use of widgets for customizing and broadening the experience.

Without a doubt, Google Wave sounds like a might powerful tool, particularly in the enterprise arena. Imagine access to such a facile and speedy set of tools across departments or units – not only can the process be shared (like a wiki) but participants can get involved and see others’ involvement in the process right here and right now.

Sounds great, right? Well, not everyone is buying the hype. Carmi Levy at BetaNews has announced that he is sitting out the first “wave” of Wavers . Levi believes that Wave won’t be as big as Gmail, in large part due to the fact that “collaboration isn’t the holy grail of productivity.” Levi also thinks that most collaborators are not yet ready for the rocket-powered Wave: even the relatively simpler Google Docs has not broken among Levi’s peers and the emailing of Microsoft attachments remains the most popular method of securing feedback and a team result.

Then there is the question of security – while a Waver must have permission to participate, allowing anyone to edit source data tends to offend every traditional data security principle.

Robert Scoble also exhibits skepticism regarding the value of Wave as a true productivity tool. Scoble suggests that Wave represents multiple layers of unproductive tools: email, topped with chat, topped with social media, topped with features that lack an intuitive interface, et cetera. Scoble also criticizes Wave for its lack of integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets and its tortoise-like pace. Hit the jump above for his fleshed-out discourse as to why he is not ravin’ ’bout the Wave.

Steven Hodson at the Inquisitr seems similarly unimpressed, mostly due to the difficulty he experienced ramping up with Google Wave and getting even rudimentary controls under control. He is holding his conclusions in check until he can spend more time with the tool and, hopefully, “get” the hype.

Steve Rubel opines that Google Wave, as it currently stands, is not a Twitter, Facebook or even email killer, in large part due to its complexity. Rubel believes it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, but is hopeful that Google Wave 2.0 addresses the concern and delivers on the promise.

Louis Gray’s take is not as critical, as he offers his personal experience with Google Wave here. He crafts a nice overview of the user experience, for those craving their own near-hands-on. But even he suggests that Google Wave will prove most useful for collaboration among small teams. And, reading between his lines, Gray appears to lament the fact that Google Wave is simply another place to check for conversations and information exchange, further burdening an already overburdened on-line network of email and social media outposts. It seems Wave may not be the ideal source for “crowd” conversations among large groups.

So, does my post sound a bit like the fox who couldn’t reach the proverbial grapes, proclaiming them to be sour as he quits the quest? Maybe so. But I am still hot to try Google Wave and allow my own first-hand experience to be my guide. I am guarded, however, after reading the somewhat critical reviews from some of tech’s elite. If these guys are having issues with Google Wave, how will the average tech-averse lawyer or business person manage its might? In any event, if a reader has an extra invite to pass along, I wouldn’t turn it down and might even be your best friend.

Maybe you are one of the lucky few already enjoying Wave and currently making up your own mind about its utility or lack thereof. I have something for you too: a cheatsheet for Wave searching from Google itself.

Check out the lengthy Google developers preview video that follows. Or hit the simplistic video further below, linked in Scoble’s post.

From the home office in Honolulu, Hawaii…

#1: Gartner Social Software Hype Cycle is out. See where 45 technologies are in the cycle (via Spigit blog) http://bit.ly/19Uw6k #e20

#2: Does Silicon Valley noise detract from long-term value creation? http://bit.ly/188Trx by @andrew_chen #innovation

#3: CNET: A Google Wave reality check http://bit.ly/34fv21 I, for one, love seeing the painful process of development, even at Google.

#4: I think we need a recount: EvanCarmichael.com ranks the Top 50 Geek Entrepreneur blogs http://bit.ly/YT1nn I come in #7 behind @louisgray

#5: The Atlantic: The Truth About IQ http://bit.ly/1l0qfR “Being branded with a low IQ at a young age, in other words, is like being born poor”

#6: The science of hunches? http://bit.ly/CDTJi by @berkun Like his take about the importance of emotions in the decision process

#7: Creating psychological distance f/ a problem is key to increasing your creativity. Make it abstract http://bit.ly/f7XUy #innovation

#8: BofA to Shut 600 Branches Due to Surge in Online & Mobile Banking http://bit.ly/14S4mg I never go in branches. Purely web + ATM.

#9: Ever wonder why we swing our arms when we walk? Research finds it’s more efficient than keeping our arms still http://bit.ly/O0Pwj

#10: Our friends’ 3 y.o. son cut the ribbon on remodeled SF playground today. He has spinal muscular atrophy, & can now play http://bit.ly/Z3DZR

So here’s some fun you can have on Google. In the search box, enter ‘Do’ followed by the name of a corporate body, or ‘Does’ followed by the name of a famous person, and see what suggestions for possible searches come up. It’s good for a bit of inane fun.

Via Louis Gray on FriendFeed.

Two years ago, I wrote to Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble about hats.  Robert ignored me, but Chris posted my letter on his blog.  That was just my first effort to get social networks, any social network, to adopt the hats concept.  I talked about it several times in my own blogs, and even emailed the idea to Twitter and FriendFeed many months ago.  Still nobody is doing it, that I know of.

This is amazing to me, because hats are THE way we intrinsically manage our lives.  Hats are the one best solution to naturally clear up all kinds of problems generated by poorly designed social networks that don’t take anthropology into account nor give social science its proper due.

Getting back to our hypothetical case study, I’ll list a few of the benefits of using hats.

Benefits to Louis Gray –

1. Louis’s intimate space is “always on.”  This means that whatever he is doing, his phone, other mobile device or computer will alert him to new messages from the people he is closest to.  He can also allow others on a temporary bases to cross into his intimate space, such as when he has a big business deal brewing and needs to stay accessble at all times.

2. On the other hand, Louis can choose to avoid work space by turning off his tech hat.  This means that his tech blogger role won’t bleed into his family time.  His tech hat will be there waiting for him when time and space are appropriate.

3.  Louis can have an infinite number of hats that can come and go.  Perhaps he wants to create a “Tourist – India” hat to get travel offers, meet people who live there, etc.  Or maybe he wants to create a “Jane Doe Supporter” hat during an election season. Louis will be able to find discussion groups, audiences and information/entertainment resources for whatever role or interest he wants to discover and talk about.  He won’t be strapped to “tech blogger” alone, in danger of losing his audience if his interests and roles shift.

4. Louis can either let down his hair or get more charged up in private groups.  Perhaps this isn’t important to Louis Gray, since he is very even keel, but it is a big issue to many others.  For example, my daughter is a young defense attorney.  She and her former classmates from law school were recently talking about how they have become scared of social networks.  Do you post your stuffy “I’m a lawyer” photo on Facebook?  That hardly seems appropriate.  But if not that persona, then what?  Prospective clients will Google you.  Prospective employers and partners will Google you.  Can you be less than 100% professional online 100% of the time without potentially harming yourself?  Well, in the Hive  you can, because hats and space let you control  your exposure.

5. Louis will always know who his readers are.  In the Hive, you deposit objects wearing your hat, but other members will accept and share that object wearing their own hat, and those hats might not be the same.   What percentage of Louis’s readers are working on startups?  Or are IT managers for large companies?  Google employees?  Just tech curious?  Louis will know exactly who his readers/viewers are, not just overall, but for every single object he deposits.  He will know the sex and age breakdown, too.  (“This video was appreciated by female engineers”, “That lesson went over big with startups”, “Hmmm, only over 50 men seemed to like my article on Pickleberry.com.”)

6.  Louis can create timeless pieces that may be active and generate income for months and perhaps even years to come.  Blog posts are tied to pages that have very short shelf life.  In the Hive, every object is independent and the shelf life between objects can vary greatly.  “Classic” pieces will remain visible and easily accessible for the full life of their relevancy, instead of being buried under subsequent posts or forever abandoned by broken links.

7. Louis’s Hive activity will provide a much greater benefit to this wallet than his Web activity can.  Hats not only allow users to discover relevant content and help manage their lives, they benefit advertisers by breaking down groups into well-targeted demographics.  This means higher quality, more effective advertising that brings Louis many opportunities to save money and make money.

8.  Louis can “will” his deposits to others.  He can do this quickly by hat, if he so chooses.  His creations will stay ad inventory and saleable and can thereby be a valuable gift.  Of course, the real benefit is that his creations and artifacts will survive his passing, potentially being passed on to his descendents and accessible by historians for generations.

Benefits to Louis’s readers –

1. No noise!  You get to read/view the “parts” of Louis that you are interested in.  Don’t like his political posts?  Just don’t take the feed to his political hat.  (I actually don’t know Louis’s political slant, but if I could opt out of Dave Winer’s political rants, maybe I’d still be taking his blog feed.)

2. Enjoyment of a long-tail buffet that doesn’t currently exist.  Are non-techie Sacramento Kings fans going to subscribe to Louis’s blog on the chance that he might write about their team once or twice a year?  Hardly.  And how would they know Louis’s blog exists even if they were interested?  Hat’s are essential to creating the endless channels that flow information and entertainment (including valuable ads) to people who will find them relevant.

In the final Part 3 of the hypothetical Louis Grey case study, I will get more detailed about how he can earn money from the Hive.

Before delving into geeky detail about how the Hive will work (getting you the reader “lost in tall weeds,” as journalists say), I’ll first try to give hypothetical yet illustrative examples of how actual people might use the Hive.

To start, I’m going to pick on Louis Gray, a tech blogger in Silicon Valley.

To make the Hive’s channels efficient and effective, members will divide themselves by HAT – that is, into the roles and passions they want to bring online.  This division is natural and intuitive; it reflects the top level means we all have of managing our lives in the real world, every day.

Louis might pick (not in passion-order here):

1. Tech Blogger
2. Father
3. Sports Nut
4. Music Lover

Louis would assign each one of these hats a color, so that he can see and manage his life, easily integrating his online experience with his offline reality.  For example, if he assigns “Tech Blogger” the color red and “Father” the color blue, then if he will instantly know the mental bucket incoming communications fall into, even before he knows who sent them and without the need to read a subject line.  Segregating communications, putting them into their proper “space” to save when time, mood and location is appropriate, becomes a breeze.

Which brings us to the second major, natural way we all manage our lives – by SPACE.

• A. Public
• B. Social
• C. Private
• D. Intimate

In the Hive, each of these spaces will be represented by geographical shapes.  These shapes can be tapped (on the iPhone, for example) or clicked (on a computer), to open up discussion that flows to us like email.  (The Hive will actually replace the need for email.)

1A Tech/Public – Four shapes govern any public space.  Under Louis’s tech hat/public space, he will likely use them all.  Again, all will be outlined in red, so that that Louis will know which ones are for his tech hat, even when they aren’t sorted by hat.

First, a triangle that brings up Louis’s own deposits along with their stats.

public broadcast, one to many, transmitter

Second, an inverted triangle that holds public objects from other broadcasters who Louis subscribes to wearing his Tech hat.  

aggregated public broadcasts, receiver side

Third, is a star that Louis uses to segregate out one particular broadcaster of interest, in order to catch all of his or her posts quickly.

single public broadcast, receiver side

Fourth, a trapezoid represents a “stage,” which in Louis’s case would be “The Social Geeks,” but the shape can also be used by “The Gilmore Gang,” etc.

public broadcast, few to many, transmitter side (and also receiver side)

 1B Tech/Social -  There is only one social symbol: a beehive shape.  Louis can move in and out of this space at any time and will see and can interact with posts from whomever happens to be there.  The social space is “live” only, and posts are kept only 60 minutes after the poster leaves.

Live, unstored, many to many 

1C Tech/Private – There are two shapes in the Private space

 A circle means that the space is private, but open to new members joining.  When somebody searchs “Louis Gray” or “tech blogger,” she will be shown Louis’s public feed and any open private groups he might belong to, as an invitation to subscribe (free trial, if there is a fee) or to join.

A square means that the space is private and closed.  It is not seen by anybody outside of the private group members, much less offered to outsiders.

D Intimate Four shapes govern the intimate area, which is never assigned hats: an oval (meaning friend), a diamond (meaning boss or co-worker), a heart (closest friends and family) and an apple (teacher or classmates) [Note: these are just examples: Louis can assign his own symbols in the Intimate space, however he chooses.]

Intimate areas will usually be one to one, but they can also be few to few.  For example, Louis could have an intimate group that includes his wife and parents.

In the next post, we’ll briefly look at Louis’s “Father” hat, and I’ll explain how all this “fractal’ing” of Louis Gray benefits him, his family and his readers.

It’s 4.58 am this morning in the UK and the alarm kicks off. I’ve set it to bag my Facebook username. What this means is that whenever I direct people to Facebook, I will no longer send them to a URL ending in a strange collection of numbers but rather to my name. Facebook only let us know about this around four days ago.

It’s 4.59 am and as the laptop boots up, I’m thinking that I must me mad. Or, worse still, is this yet another sign that I am addicted to the web? My friend Peter Moore seems to give the theory substance with a Tweet saying “Working with social media can be like having a serious drug problem“.

Facebook’s username selection page loads up and is now counting down the seconds. I am actually shaking.

It’s 5.00 am I begin to remember why it is I am doing this. Try having a pretty average name like “John Welsh”. Google Alerts make it clear just how widespread it is. In one week, all these John Welshes are mentioned:

• John Welsh, of the Hibernian Society of Utah
• John Welsh, the photographer
• John Welsh, principal of Key West High School
• John Welsh, a US trader
• John Welsh of the Riverside County Department of Animal Services, CA
• John Welsh, an English actor in the Duchess of Duke Street
• John Welsh, an English footballer
• John Welsh will sell you tickets to the John O’Leary band
• John Welsh, a Liberal Democrat councillor came second in a recent election in Sudbury, England

As you can see, there’s quite a lot of us.

It’s 5.01 am and the countdown reaches zero. I am just about to claim my name and deep peace settles in. I am almost in a state of Zen-like kama. If you, like me, came late to social media, you will have a ragbag of names on your social media profiles. Yes, I’ve managed to bag

• John Welsh on Twitter
• John Welsh on WordPress

But I don’t own John Welsh dot com, taken quite sensibly years ago. And, as for the majority of my social media profiles, they boast a confusion of letters and numbers attached to my name, all of which seem pretty straightforward when compared to my utterly ridiculous Gmail address – johnchriswelsh@googlemail.com. It’s very length and complexity seems to deny the very purpose of social media.

Addicted to the web maybe, but desperate to unclutter my social media footprint, yes! Chuffed to be sufficiently up to speed with social media nowadays that I can do today what many people have been doing for years and lay claim to my name first, yes! Keen to take control of my username for any eventuality the future might throw up, yes!

It’s 5.02 am my name sits there beside a radio button, I press enter and that is it, I’ve nabbed www.Facebook.com/johnwelsh. Back to bed.

It’s 9.00am and I follow a Tweet by Louis Gray to his blog post and realise quite how lucky I have been.

image taken from: http://ascannerdorky.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/10/

The definition of Social Media according to Wikipedia is:

Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

It sounds perfectly reasonable. Social Media gives us all the power to become publishers. To distribute our content and interact over them. To a certain extend this is true. But if you think that the world is waiting for you and your content think again. It isn’t that easy. There are certain rules you need to understand and follow.

While distribution scales endlessly, your ability to interact will not

Wikipedia is right about the scalable publishing technologies. Anyone can now create, publish and distribute content across the web. The technologies involved allow you to reach out to audiences far beyond your social network. There is a problem with this scalability. While your content can be distributed endlessly, your ability to interact over that content cannot. In a sense many of the current successful web 2.0 companies try to scale down this endless stream of content and conversations. Our human limitations do not allow us to follow 10.000 people, process millions of pieces of content and interact over all of them.

Technology tries to help us bring order into this chaos by allowing us to broadcast without the need of interaction (Twitter), limit content and discussions to people we trust (Friendfeed), build up a network of friends we want interaction with (Facebook) or attempt to capture the conversation in one place (Disqus). While technology has found us easy to use and scalable distribution, we do not have proper solutions yet for scaling down our interactions. Search for signal to noise and you will find many different startups and services trying to solve our human limitations wrt scale. This is not a new problem. Google has been working on this for years. They build their search engine and PageRank to try and provide a better signal to noise ratio. It is impossible for us to see all content on the web, so we use search engines to find us the right content.

Social Media adds another dimension to this scalability. It gives us not only more content but also more interaction over that content. Needless to say that this leads to an unprecedented nr of startups trying to provide us new methods and technology to deal with this endless stream of content we now call Social Media.

Social Media isn’t always democratic, it is a game that has winners,  losers and cheaters

Anyone can become a celebrity. The past few years of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogging and Idols have proven that anyone can become a hero, right? Hardly. Of course there are excellent examples of people coming from nowhere into stardom, but for every 1 success there are a million failures. When it comes to online distribution and scale, you need to understand that while the technology itself is perfectly scalable, the actual game is a game with winners, losers an cheaters. There are those that have worked extremely hard, for many years, to become a celebrity (In the Tech world people like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray would fit into this category). These people have been providing constant value and interaction to a community and have earned respect and a voice from that.

Then there are those that understand the dynamics behind the game and seek an audience by taking a few shortcuts here and there. Instead of slowly building up an audience by providing constant quality, they actively seek high visibility through different channels and circling around other celebrities. Getting noticed by a person or channel representing a large community will help build your own community of people you can interact with. Needless to say you do need to provide valuable content in order to get noticed. Bottom line is that it takes a lot of work and a thorough understanding of the dynamics of Social Media to become a well known community member. Just because publishing has become easy doesn’t mean that you will be heard.

And there are those that become instant celebrities because they cheat. If you are thinking about becoming a web rock star yourself. Be prepared to either invest all of your time for the next few years in publishing relevant an valuable content and slowly building up a community of followers. Or cheat, buy yourself into high volume traffic without actually having to do anything relevant to earn such a position (I suggest becoming a recommended Twitter user for example).

Don’t get fooled by the ease to publish. Social Media isn’t easy. It takes a lot of hard work to interact

I see the following type of conversation pop up all the time on Friendfeed. A user observes that while he is active on the community, the content he publishes doesn’t draw a lot of attention (=discussion). This is the perfect way to start interaction on Friendfeed btw . It takes only a few seconds before the community starts to give helpful hints. Bottom line in most cases seem to be ‘give and you shall receive’. In other words. If you want people to interact with you, start by interacting with them. In order to become a respectable member of any community, you not only need to produce relevant and valuable content for that community. You also need to add value via interaction. Give, without expecting something in return. While this makes perfect sense, it doesn’t make things easier. Not everyone is as outspoken. There is always a small subset of the community that is responsible for a large part of the interactions. It’s hard to make your voice count. And while the technology does level the playing field (anyone can be or interact with a celebrity), it doesn’t automatically mean that you are heard. It takes time, effort, and a lot of positive energy to build your own voice within a community.

Some random thoughts

Social Media provides us endless possibilities to create, mash up, publish and interact over content. The one thing that holds this endless scalability back is the human factor. We simply can’t deal with a universe where there are no boundaries. As soon as we enter this world we set a playing field by following a specific set of people, signing up for certain services, interact in specific places, search, filter and share specific content. It help us to create order in a chaotic world. The biggest effect Social Media might have is that we will use it to make our world smaller instead of bigger. Quality over quantity. We might see a trend where networks will become smaller instead of bigger. Where content and interactions will become highly focused instead of widespread. Where geoposition and localization will be more important than globalization. Where interaction with people you have actually met will become more important than people you have stumbled across online.

Just like in the physical world

I cannot express how pleased I was to discover yesterday that one of my absolute favorite blogs included the Studio on a list of Five Blogs Under The Radar: May  2009 Edition. Louis Gray is a tech blogger at his site louisgray.com where, since 2006, he has “express[ed his] personal observations on the world of technology, the Web, and innovation.” Check out his About page for the “why” of my deep appreciation for his content as well as my feeling of great honor at being included.

My impression of Mr. Gray’s blogging agenda is one of intelligence, integrity and impartiality.  He understands what his readers are looking for and why it is necessary to secure their respect. In kind, his readers do respect him and his points of view. I have cited to Mr. Gray before on the Studio and I regularly read his posts – not just to secure content leads but, more importantly, to actually learn something new and satisfy my curious nature!

Thank you, Louis, for the mention and I hope to continue providing content in the Studio that meets your high standards! And for Studio readers looking for intelligent, in-depth evaluation and analysis of tech-related subject matter — run, don’t walk, to louisgray.com.

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From the home office in Pleasanton, CA…

#1: Fast paced start-up seeks Project Manager – Spigit job opening (posted to Craigs List) http://ff.im/2WcXy

#2: Spigit customer Pfizer is in today’s 24 Hours of Innovation (http://bit.ly/rkQiO). Preview their upcoming video: http://bit.ly/Rg6u0 #24hoi

#3: Why Do So Many Big Companies Suck at Innovation? asks @BobWarfield http://bit.ly/1qkRW

#4: Reading: 56 Reasons Why Most Corporate Innovation Initiatives Fail http://bit.ly/3lw6Ju

#5: Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath http://bit.ly/1aikhU by Malcolm @Gladwell, The New Yorker (via @dpritchett)

#6: Webinars are a lot of work. Much creating and researching. Then practice and deliver it. After you do it, lots of work putting it out there.

#7: Digging the new NYT real-time feed. As soon as a story or opinion piece is published, it hits the timeline: http://bit.ly/19cj3P

#8: Smart post: Are you building an everyday app? (the LinkedIn problem) http://bit.ly/sa1IV via @louisgray

#9: Fun with Wolfram Alpha. Type in pi. One of the options lets you look at more digits, then more digits, then more digits…

#10: Playing Candyland with the kids on this Mothers Day. Key is to draw that Ice Cream Cone pink card. Sure path to victory.

Popular blogger and publisher, Louis Gray gave a highly engaging presentation at the Inbound Marketing Summit on filtering out the noise and finding the signal in this age of  information overload.

Mark Evans  describes Louis Gray as,

“..one of the hottest one-man shows on the tech blogging scene, who has literally come out of nowhere in the past few month. Now, Gray is literally everywhere – breaking stories, providing in-depth coverage of new startups such as FriendFeed, and cementing himself within the Techmeme 100.”

Information overload is a crippling problem for many marketers in this social media age and those of us who follow Gray have wondered for a long time how he manages to do it with relative ease. It was a rare treat to listen to this guru of tech blogging and get tips & tools for finding the signal in all the noise.

• How to get emails when your keywords come up on Twitter
• Get emails when your keywords are mentioned in blog comments around the web
• Search aggregators that find all mentions across multiple services at once

He started by asking the audience,

“What will you remember when you get home?”

He went on to say, “…let tools do the work for you and cut through the noise to find the signal.” Louis shared his recommended tools for search, aggregation &  blog search.

BackType and TweetBeep are the two tools he recommends for search and find. Backtype is a comment keyword search across blogs, including trends, while TweetBeep can search tweets for keywords 24×7 and send it to your mailbox.

For blog search and aggregation, Gray recommends using Google blog search and FriendFeed. Google blog search scours blogs for keywords and delivers it as feed through your favorite reader. FriendFeed on the other hand lets you search blogs and about 50 other social sites.

Managing the noise:

Gray was blunt in his assessment that, “You created this mess.You were the one who signed up for the emails and RSS feeds.” Here’s some sage advice he gave the audience:

• Stop signing up so many RSS feeds
• Skim like mad and unsubscribe from lists that are not relevant or interesting
• Reduce inbound by reducing outbound emails
• Use search instead of using RSS feeds for everything
• Use recommendations or aggregation sites to filter out the noise

It’s not about shutting everything down completely:

• Use RSS feeds efficiently
• Find people you trust and use them as filters
• Participate where it makes sense

You don’t need to read every word:

• Review the author information
• Speed read, skim and if the content isn’t relevant, move on

Prioritize the data “Not all data is equal”

Just like you wouldn’t treat email from your boss the same way as you would an email from a friend, same holds true for blogs and tweets. Impact is a direct result of influence.

• Focus on the ones that are most relevant
• Don’t be afraid to unsubscribe if it’s not relevant any more

Gray says,

“Prioritize, filter and leverage trusted discovery tools”

How to determine influence for Blogs, Twitter, and FriendFeed?

It’s not perfect but Gray suggested few ways you can assess  influence:

• Frequency of updates and level of active participation is a key component of how to measure influence
• Length/tenure and quality of participation in the form of followers, subscribers is a measure of influence

Simply put,

“Do people see the activity and respond?”

According to Gray, “information overload” is a result of trying not to miss anything, which is not realistic and will fail. “Don’t add just for the heck of adding.” but also not leveraging tools available to manage information efficiently. He ended this fascinating talk by reiterating that “there is no information overload and you can cut through to find the signal”.

What recession? Not in the digital media or interactive industries, as far as I can tell.

Last night I spent the early part of the evening in the UStream.tv makeshift studio at the Belmont Lounge watching Michael Wright interview people with “big ideas” and live stream over the Internets.

It was awesome. Wright’s idea is to have big thinkers discuss big ideas in an open source way during SxSW. In the course of the two or three hours I was there, I met blogger Louis Gray, Stephen Self, a videographer from Tyler, Texas whose company, N-Ventive TV, set up the studio for Michael Wright, and Tom Serres, CEO of Piryx, a platform to help newbies get involved in democracy and run for office.

The conversation between Brian Roy (JustSignal), Tom, and myself was so interesting to me that I kept it going after the program was over, not realizing that Tom was mic’d and that his mic was still on, so we were broadcasting. A couple of Twitter friends of mine let me know later.

Before that, I went to the Mix at Six party, where I met many of my fellow-organizers of Social Media Clubs across the country and got to say hello to Jeremiah Owyang, my favorite web strategist
and a man crazy enough to wear a white jacket to a party where I was drinking red wine:-)

And after that I went to the TechSet Party, where I ran into Beth Kanter, who is moving to California to take a “corporate” gig as something I can’t recall (yes, the wine). What I always remember is how incredible a resource for non-profits Beth has always been and will continue to be as she unleashes the power of social media to change the world.

All the while, I was texting with my business partner, who was at a completely different set of places with totally different people (obviously).

No more linkbait, but I also ran into Hugh McLeod, Brian Solis, Erica O’Grady, and Jen Myronuk.

You get the picure. If you want to meet someone you’ve been following on Twitter, if you admire that “certain” blogger who doesn’t do email, or if you want to come down here with a sleeping, find someone with a room, and sleep on the floor.

Oh, about the content? I didn’t see anything I really wanted to go to:-)

UPDATE: I’ve added an eleventh!

You’ve only just learnt to manage your daily reading through RSS feeds. And soon you find yourself overwhelmed with the number of blogs to which you have subscribed. What do you do? 

Why not subscribe to the Google Reader Shared Items of those bloggers that you trust and admire? Here is how to find Google Reader Shared Items from anyone if you don’t know where to look.Or follow my list and discover some with whom you might not be so familiar.

They appraise hundreds of blogs on a daily basis and post only those they rate to their Google Reader Shared Items. 

They make choices – having edited down the mass to a manageable few - so you will need to do much less reading. 

You might also be introduced to new thinkers and writers. These bloggers tend to subscribe to so many blogs – Mike Fruchter mentions subscribing to over 1000 in a guest post on how to become a power Google reader on this blog - that they come across hidden gems.

Of course you have to trust the blogger’s taste, values and editing skills. But, a hint here. If they produce regular work of a consistent standard that strikes a chord with you, their Google Reader Shared Items is just as likely to be for you.

Here’s a list of ten Google Reader Shared Items to which you can subscribe saving you time.

1. AJ Kohn - Some serious tech stuff but also an nice eclectic mix of sci-fi book reviews and social media badges. (MF)
2. Chris Brogan – Just like his blog, Chris’ Shared Items are a useful spread of the best new and social media writing. 
3. Corvida Raven - Social media blogger behind “SheGeeks”, student and evangelist. She’s gonna’ go far. (LG)
4. Jesse Stay - Blogger and author of ”The Social Geek”. (MF)
5. Louis Gray -If you cannot face TechCrunch, GigaOM and Gawker filling your reader every day, sign up to Louis’ list.
   
6. Mark Dykeman - The Canadian’s choices cover communication, social media, and technology. (MF)
7. Mike Fruchter - Mike is famous for the width of his reading. It comes out in these Shared Items.
   
8. NetMediaPlanet -  From NMP’s research and insight department and details development in various verticals from search, PPC, social media to online behavior in general. (PM)
9. Rob Diana - Author behind RegularGeek blog “where programming, the internet and social media collide”. (LG)
10. Steve Rubel - As you would expect of a leading PR blogger, much on new rather than social media, many from his company’s blog.
    
11. David Cohn – building his own personal brand and commenting on the new journalism.

Thanks to Mike Fruchter (MF), Louis Gray (LG) and Peter Moore (PM) for their suggestions.

If you still cannot find anything in those ten, then try FriendFeed’s Shared Items room, as suggested to me by Louis Gray. 

Are you going to subscribe to some Google Reader Shared Items? And, if you already do, whom would you add to the list?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!