Mr T's rants and ravings

Mark Cuban has an interesting post that asks if ESPN.com has a Twitter problem. It seems, to him and he may well be right, that ESPN is not getting as much traffic from Twitter and Facebook as they would like.  Their reporters have too few followers and ESPN doesn’t seem to be able to correct that. Cuban suggests that online sports properties who hire people with effective Twitter accounts could win traffic that ESPN would like to have.

He’s probably right. This suggests the question of what is the value of an online presence? Twitter for one. Blogs for another. Facebook perhaps as well. I think it is pretty clear that they have some value but how is it determined.

I went looking for sites that set values for Twitter accounts. http://whatsmytwitteraccountworth.com/ says my Twitter is worth $1,102. Yawn. http://tweetworth.com/alfredtwo says $4,984 and that is with very stale data – I have 50% more followers then they show. I’m not sure how they calculate these numbers but clearly they use different formulas and I have no way of accessing the validity of them. Worse still I think that formulas like this can’t possibly have enough context to affix a real value. Of course this could be because I assign a much higher value to my Twitter account. The people I follow are invaluable to me!

In the marketplace an item’s value is usually determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. Lots of things go in to determining what someone will pay of course. We’re really still early in valuing social media exposure. In times that this it is tempting to use formulas that only look at raw numbers. I don’t think that tells the whole story or even close to it though.

Lady Gaga has over 9 million followers. I have no doubt that her account has a lot of value to her. It lets her promote herself, her brand, her concerts, and what ever else is part of her business. But would her account, or more correctly the set of people her tweets reach, have the same value to someone else? Probably not.

If you are just trying to reach a lot of people with something most people are interested in knowing about her account would have some value. If you are looking to promote an ESPN.com article about the NBA it probably isn’t as valuable. Mark Cuban, with “only” 386,000 followers, may be more valuable. If you wanted to reach tech geeks Robert Scoble, with “only” 173,000 followers may be worth a lot more to you.

In the latter two cases you are getting a higher percentage of people who are actively interested in the topic. Better yet, those are people who are retweeted, there messages are passed along, to still more people who are interested in what you are promoting. That sort of things adds up quickly. But how do you measure it and how to you assign a value to it? I think the jury is still out on that.

Still I think it is clear that having an online presence in social networking is valuable. As time goes on companies are going to place more and more value on that sort of thing. I know people who have gotten jobs based in part on their blogs. I as sure that there are companies who look at Twitter accounts and other online presences. Smart companies look beyond raw numbers and try to see what the target audience is and how well messages spread though a person’s online activities.

Are we at the point where companies shop for people with specific online audiences? Probably in a few niches like tech news we are probably already there. Will it grow? I think so.  But only time will tell if companies are going to be willing to count online presence in the same ways they count more traditional forms of goodwill that a potential employee brings to the table.

Cross out what you’ve done.

graduated high school.
smoked a cigarette.
kissed someone.
gotten so drunk you passed out.
ridden every ride at an amusement park.
collected something really stupid.
gone fishing.
watched four movies in one night.
gone long periods of time without sleep.
lied to someone.
snorted cocaine.
failed a class.
been in a car accident.
been in a tornado.
done hard drugs.
watched someone die.
been to a funeral.
burned yourself.
run a marathon.
cried yourself to sleep.
spent over $200 in one day.
flown on a plane.
written a 10 page letter.
gone skiing.
been sailing.
had a best friend.
lost someone you loved.
shoplifted something.
been to jail.
dangerously close to being in jail.
had detention.
skipped school.
got in trouble for something you didn’t do.
stolen books from the library.
gone to a different country.
dropped out of school.
been in a mental hospital.
watched the “harry potter” movies.
had an online diary.
fired a gun.
gambled in a casino.
had a yard sale.
had a lemonade stand.
actually made money at the lemonade stand.
been in a school play.
taken a lie detector test.
swam with dolphins.
gone to sea world.
voted for someone on a reality tv show.
written poetry.
read more than 20 books a year.
gone to europe.
used a coloring book over age 12.
had surgery.
had stitches.
taken a taxi.
seen the Washington monument.
had more than 5 im’s/online conversations going at once.
overdosed.
had a drug or alcohol problem.
been in a fist fight.
suffered any form of abuse.
had a hamster.
pet a wild animal.
used a credit card.
gone surfing in California.
done “spirit day” at school.
dyed your hair.
gotten a tattoo.
had something pierced.
gotten straight a’s.
been on the honor roll.
known someone with HIV or AIDS.
taken pictures with a webcam.
started a fire.
gotten caught having/going to a party while parents were gone.

Like a lot of people I have alerts set so that I am notified when my name comes up on the Internet. (Please tell me I am not alone.) I think it is good practice because I know that a lot of people look me up because of my job. While I don’t have a very common first name my last name is common enough that people with the same first and last name do show up on the Internet besides me. Several of them, sadly to say, for criminal activity. I suspect that almost everyone has someone with the same name who gets into trouble. I keep hoping that someone with my name will make the news for something good. And today it happened.

In the UK a man named Alfred Thompson stopped an armed (with a knife) robbery and held the criminal for police. (Story here) Mr. Thompson I salute you. Not sure I’d have the courage to do the same but I do appreciate you bringing honour to our name. Thanks.

This started as a comment I wanted to leave on a blog post by Robert Scoble but after I started writing it it felt too long for a comment and too far off the main focus of his post.

When I see a list of most influential anything the first thing I wonder about is context. There are some 300+ twitter users with over a million followers. Most of them have no influence in *my* life. I think I follow, technically, a couple of them but really don’t pay that much attention to them. A number of people with hundreds (or fewer) followers have more day to day influence with me.

In my case I follow several lines in Twitter. Tech of course. Friends as well. The big group though is education which in some cases overlaps friends and tech. Who is influential in that context is not influential in the context of the sort of tech Scoble writes about but may be very influential in educational technology.

Now I like making lists as much as the next guy (more than some) but I have to realize that the people who make lists have their own context and their own idea of influence and I might very well be influential in the areas I want/need to be without making those lists. I think that judging influence only makes sense when looking at one person in the context where they are trying to make a difference.

My friend Doug Peterson (@DougPete) and I frequently share “another list we didn’t make.” It’s a bit of a joke and we both (I think) see these lists as interesting but not important enough to get upset over not being included. We share ideas, thoughts, conversations, and quips. We try to be interesting, helpful and useful. If we have influence fine. If not, well, if we are helpful to someone that is good enough.

I think I worry a lot more than Doug about “influence.” Call it insecurity on my part. Or ego. It’s most definitely a weakness on my part – a vanity. At the end of the day though I know I will never have the influence of many many other people on Twitter and I am ok with that.

And besides, those lists are not to be taken seriously. Entertainment value only. Even, or perhaps especially, the ones that list me.

We’ve (US government and businesses) not really been good in the sense of being principled with regards to our relations with kings, dictators and tyrants in my opinion. What we have long been is practical. That is to say that stability is good for us so we have tolerated and supported anyone who kept a country stable – at least outwardly. Maintaining any sort of stability in a totalitarian society requires a lot of energy. And it requires keeping opponents from getting organized. So the stability is more in appearance than in actuality. What has happened is that communication has gotten less centralized and so harder to infiltrate and control. Instability has followed.

I think the reason the religious was involved in some of the early revolts, Iran kicking out the Shah for example, is that the only organization was the religious organization. These days communication and organization is more widespread and driven more by economic than religious or purely political reasons. My hope, and to some extent my belief, is that once tasting popular control people in many of these countries will be unwilling to surrender it to new tyrants. This seems especially likely in Tunisia. How stable Egypt becomes depends on the army keeping the elections clean and fair.

People are worried about Saudi Arabia and I think they should be. The royal family has the support of the Bedouin and their own favorites but not of the small middle and upper classes. The old trading families, who we hear very little about but some of whose children I have had as students, are also fans of stability and they will support the royals only as long as that stability is maintained. The king there has opened his check book and that may keep the peace for a while. How long is any ones guess.

I’m not seeing anyone in the US government making friends with the people who will likely take over in the event the royals get tossed out. In my opinion that would more likely be the wealthy trading families who would be more likely to support a democratic meritocracy than the religious radicals there. That good be good for the US and the business of those families is business and they have more in common with the US than not.

The key will be who the masses support if they no longer support the royals. Complex situation. And it could go either way. The edge I give to the trading families is that they know their resource is the minds of their people and they are educated as well as money can buy.

Oil prices are as stable as the political landscape so we are going to see some uncertainty for a while. When it gets stable it will stabilize lower than it currently is but probably not back to anything like a historic low. This is the message the Republican right does not seem to want to recognize. I am not global warming nut but even I can see that relying on overseas oil, or oil in general, is not sustainable. China sees it and they are doing more than we are about it. We are falling behind. Will this current situation teach us anything? I have my doubts.

I am writing this (and assuming my wireless connection holds – posting) from the Amtrak Auto Train. Pretty nice ride with power at the seats. Looking out the windows of the top level of this two layer train I can see a lot of things that most people can’t or at least don’t see.

For example passing through one station I could look down on the top of the cover over the platform. There I saw what looked like a perfectly good hack saw. It is unlikely that many who can get to it will ever see it up there. At least until someone some day climbs up to do some sort of work. I wonder if the person who left it there has any clue at all where it was misplaced.

One sees lot of items along the train tracks that just don’t seem to belong. They look lost. I keep thinking that making up stories about how they got there would be an interesting writing exercise. One of these days I’ll remember a good camera on a train trip and take a lot of pictures of such items. Yeah, sure I will.

Something bad happened to the RSS reader I have been using for several years now. It just will not run. Why? No idea. It happened once before and I recovered the data from an old backup and installed on a different computer because no amount of reinstalling would fix it. But that is not important.

What is important was that this time I decided to start with a new online reading tool and restart what blogs I follow from scratch. I was following hundreds of blogs. Really – hundreds. I got a lot out of them but it was time consuming. I just could not bring myself to prune the list.

So today I added all the blogs of people I work with, all the computer science education blogs on my blog role, and a handful of other top education related blogs. Total is less than thirty. I’m sure I will add more over time but perhaps this time I can keep it to a more manageable level.

Though honestly I worry a bit about missing something. Hope I get over it.

The other day I went to pick up my father from the senior center where he spends many of his days. As is my habit I put a smile on my face as I walked in the door. Truth be told I was not that happy. It had been a rough day. But I make it a point to great my father with a smile on my face. I do not want him to misinterpret an expression based on a rough day as being applicable to him. I don’t want him to think that I am upset, frustrated or tired of him. Because I am not.

One of the elderly women in the center saw me and remarked to no one in particular “There he is with a simple as always.” This really struck me. The smile is not something I really think about doing but is automatic. But I wonder how many people do come to pick up older relatives with a frown or other negative expression on their faces. Is it because of the current errand (picking someone up who these see as a burden) or is it just a reflection of the day? One can’t know for sure of course but you have to wonder how it looks to someone who does feel like they are a burden. This made me redouble my practice of smiling but it also made me thing of smiles more broadly.

I believe that a smile makes people more attractive. I figure it is somewhere between 30 and 100 per cent better looking depending on the person and the context. A young woman who smiles that “boy do I think you are amazing” as a young man is probably 200% more attractive to him. Someone should do a study though. I’ll bet there is a real number that could be determined on average. So people who want to be seen as attractive should work on their smile first. It’s a lot easier than dieting or working out and less expensive than fancy clothing.

People should also smile because it makes people happy. Smiles are contagious. In fact I think you can “catch” some happiness from your own smiles.

When I was teaching I used to walk though parts of the school before school starts with a big smile on my face and a happy greeting for all I ran across on my lips. I am not a morning person so this took some work for me. But it seems like I was able to cheer people up if only a little and if only for a moment or to. But by the time my walk was finished I was happier than I was as the start. See a smile makes others happy and so they smile at you. It’s sort of recursive. Or perhaps something of a bootstrap process. But no matter how you describe it I think it is a good thing.

So smile. It will make you better looking and happier. Try it for 50 years and see if I am right.

Sunday I built a table. OK maybe a bench would be more accurate. OK maybe I should say that I nailed a bunch of wood together, dropped a section of counter top (it used to be in my kitchen but I replaced it) and am hoping it will hold up under the weight of power tools I am putting on top of it. I have more of these what ever they are to put together because I have other power tools that I need better places to put. Better than sitting on the floor in boxes that is.

I’m not a carpenter. I am not a skilled craftsman by any definition. But I do like to work with wood. Some of my projects come out pretty well. Others, well, not as well. I need practice and could probably benefit from some actual training by someone who really knows what they are doing. Time though is a problem. So I try to figure things out for myself. I read some books. Watch some videos. But mostly I rely on the training I got in high school some 40 years ago. I had a one semester course in patternmaking as a high school freshman. I later had a course in foundry, one in metal work (lathes, drills, etc.), and some sheet metal work. All in all little more than a taste of things. But I learned some concepts and they stuck with me. The high school I attended was an engineering magnet school and these were concepts and practices that were considered important for would be engineers. We also took drafting BTW. With pencils, straight edges and other hand utensils. I learned a lot from that as well.

In of of these classes (in drafting we drew things we later built) we made things. Tangible things. Hard things. Things you could carry. I wonder if we don’t do that enough anymore. Somehow making things makes concepts more real. It is one thing to tell someone that you need angled patterns so that they will come out of the form neatly so  that you can pour molten metal in afterwards and quite enough to have a mold fall apart and be unusable because you didn’t follow the rules.It is one thing to hear about how things are made and quite another to try and do it yourself. The act of creating physical objects is a powerful learning tool.

These days I make things mostly for fun. For my own amusement. I could spend a lot more money and get things professionally built. In some ways, perhaps most ways, those objects would  be prettier, more efficient, quicker to get and generally do the job better. But sometimes, just sometimes, there is more satisfaction in having an ugly, barely functional piece of construction that you really don’t want to show anyone but that solves a need and is something that you built yourself. There is something really satisfying about the process of creation. That is something else I wonder if we allow children enough of. Or do we stop at the building blocks level?