Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher

The new TV show Royal Pains is bringing some attention to an area of Long Island the media likes to call “The Hamptons.” I was born there and growing up we referred to the area as “the south fork.” Or perhaps “the east end [of Long Island]” When I was growing up there were summer people – artists, writers, actors, miscellaneous rich people – who had big summer homes but there were also baymen and farmers – lots of farmers – and it did not get the media attention it does today.

Today there are sort of two dimensions (dimensions in the science fiction sense that they occupy the same physical space but hardly interact) to the Hamptons. There are the rich and famous who occupy one dimension and the other people who live in another. For ease of use I refer to the first group as summer people and the second group as year-round people. Strictly speaking many of the “summer people” come out more than just in the summer and may even live here (I am in East Hampton as I write this) most of the time.

The media (TV and movies) mostly presents a fictional view of the summer people. The year round people are kept in the background. I can’t say I am very familiar with that dimension of the Hamptons though. The year round people a bit more. While I haven’t lived in the Hamptons full-time for 50 years I do visit regularly and my father still lives here. I like to think of myself as a “displaced Bonacker'' who knows something of the area.

The TV show Royal Pains is fairly unique in that it does show some local, year-round people types. The hospital administrator who was born and raised in Southampton (not explicitly stated but the only hospital in the Hamptons is in Southampton – I was born there) for example. The most recent episode showed the star helping a sick fisherman. Why they didn’t add some authenticity by finding a way to refer to him as a bayman I don’t know. Baymen is a general term for people who make their living from the bays and ocean around the Hamptons. That is a word I would have liked to see in the show’s “Hamptons Glossary” but I guess as it is a local word not a summer people word it didn’t make the cut.

It’s going to be interesting to watch this show (Royal Pains) to see how it treats the year round people. My suspicion is that the writers and the people working on the show are more generally influenced by summer people. There are many of them in the TV business. I’m not sure how much interaction they have with year round people other than to buy from them, hire them to do work around their houses and see them in the streets. Will they take on the number of immigrants (legal and otherwise) from south and central America? How about the summer workers from Ireland who come to the area in droves? And what more of the hard working baymen will we see?

I actually wonder how they will handle the rest of the year – not the summer. Will the late season events like the Hamptons International Film Festival (October) be an opportunity to have a bunch of high profile cameo appearances?  Will the Hampton Classic show some international beauty (ever notice how many gorgeous young women need treatment on TV shows?) falling off a horse?

Yeah, I guess I like the show. The doctor is a good guy. The young rich kid he befriends is really interesting. The hospital administrator is more attractive than most of the rich people but is still a strong and complex person one can respect. The brother and the physicians assistant add something good to the mix. The USA Network does seem to do characters well. Plus I like to keep my eye open for places I know. :-)

Note: Strictly speaking a Bonacker is from Springs, a village in the town of East Hampton, but more general usage tends to include the most of the town including the village of East Hampton.

Note: If you go to the East Hampton Village page on Wikipedia you will see a picture of the old Hook Mill windmill. That picture is very close to the view from my bedroom window when I was a small child. Our current house is close by but doesn’t have that view.

There is a saying that knowledge is power which in many ways is quite true. Related to that is that the control of knowledge (information) is also a great power. I’ve seen this several ways in my personal experience. Most recently I was on a jury. Over and over we were told to make our decisions based only on the information (evidence) that was presented to us. We were not to do any outside research on our own. No visits to the scene, no reading in newspapers, no Internet searches, nothing outside the court room. The clear goal is to let the lawyers with some help from the judge completely control the information we had.

That is the way the system is supposed to work and I guess it is mostly a good one. But for someone who likes to look up thing and dig deeper it was a little frustrating. I don’t like it when others control my access to information. But I played by the rules even though I felt like I was missing information.

More in the past was my involvement on a school district budget committee. In that role I and the other members were charged with setting the annual budget for a school system. The administration (business manager and superintendent) had almost complete control over the information we had available to do that work. Oh we could ask other people (principals, department heads, and teachers for example) but even with that for much of what we needed the administration was our only option. I remain convinced that there were times when we were “played” to some extent. Not that I suspect the administration of ill intent just that in order to get what they thought was important then controlled what we knew,

The great myth about the Internet is that it removes or bypasses the filters to information. That it empowers people by providing information they did not always have. It’s a nice story and to a great extent there is truth there. But some information is never going to be fully available online. It is in people’s heads and passed by word of mouth. It is hidden in obscure language and/or jargon. Over time some of it will be exposed but there is so much out there. Which brings up information hiding. The old stick the needle in a haystack principle. Search engines can only help so much.

Ultimately you have to be able to trust people. Trusting the powerless is so much easier than trusting the powerful though. Insisting on more transparency and holding people accountable for providing information will help. Setting standards of transparency will help create an environment were it is expected. But I think it will take time. The powerful do not relinquish power easily and the power to control information is a temptress.

I’m the son of a pastor so I could really relate to this. Funny because of the bits of truth in it.

I spent four nights on a cruise ship last week. For a couple of reasons I gave in to buy some Internet time. I wanted to post a daily blog entry on the trip, I had some important things I needed email for, and I sort of wanted to check in on twitter – mostly to promote the blog posts. So I bought 100 minutes to use over the four days. That’s 25 minutes a day total. It forced me to closely conceder what I was doing on the Internet.

The blog posts were easy. I drafted them using Windows Live Writer and then used but a few minutes to post them to the web and quickly check traffic and comments on previous posts. Email was also easy. While I was posting to the blog Outlook was downloading incoming email and uploading previously written replies and other messages. Likewise reading blogs, which I didn’t do a lot of, was also easy as RSS Bandit downloaded posts for later offline reading. But Twitter? Not so easy.

What I did first with Twitter was to post about my blog post – an addin handles that automatically.  I then quickly looked at Direct Messages and @ Replies so that I could quickly and briefly respond to those as appropriate. And maybe I scanned the most recent Tweets from the people I follow. But other than that Twitter was not something I could participate in as usual.

While blogging and email probably seemed as normal to most people I’m sure people could easily tell that I wasn’t Twittering much. Well if they were paying any attention at all – not a sure thing. But for me I felt like I was missing a lot. There was none of the usual conversations or casual banter I am used to on Twitter. I missed it all very much. I think I could easily handle rationing my online email and blogging activity but that is because there are tools for that. There is nothing to really gather a lot of Twitter traffic for reading and responding to while offline. Maybe a coding project for me? Could be but I need to find the time. Anyone know of something like this already out there?

Twitter seems to have started with the geek world but these days I think it has grown beyond that. Today I see a lot of celebrity twittering, business tweeting (in a good way mostly) and conversation in various circles that may or may not be geeky in the way we normally see geeks. A couple of examples.

This post in the Washington Post called Twittering Leaders To Learn From is one example about what is happening with business twittering. Yes there are two tech companies on the list but there is also a congressman and two leaders from the publishing industry – newspapers and books. Yes, people who print things on paper. If you do a search engine search for “comcastcares +twitter” you will find a lot being written about Frank Eliason from Comcast. Yes Comcast is about cable TV, Internet and phone service with is somewhat tech related but Frank’s work is customer service – business work that any business has. More and more companies are using Twitter to put a human face on their company and their business. This is much the same way as blogging has been used but somehow blogging still feels more geek-world while Twitter feels more real world. Perhaps that is just my perception but maybe other people see it the same way.

And then there are small sub-worlds in Twitter. take education for example. There are huge numbers of people talking about education on Twitter. Yes, some of it is edtech related but much of it is broader – school reform, charter schools, classroom management, and general “water cooler” talk. Check out the list of people who have tagged themselves with the education tag at WeFollow for example. Over a million people have used that tag there. The edtech tag at WeFollow has fewer than 200,000 people. Still a large number but small compared to the over all education total. If you look at WeFollow’s tag list you’ll see a lot of huge groups though.

But it seems like celebrities are really taking over in the area of huge followings. Ashton Kutcher (aplusk) has over 700,000 followers.  Demi Moore (mrskutcher) has over 400,000 followers. Ubergeek Robert Scoble (scobleizer) has only 78,000+ followers. What a contrast!

Now of course celebrities use Twitter differently than business twitters and in fact differently than the traditional models of using Twitter. In some ways it is still about building personal brand of course. So the goal may be similar. Businesses want to make friends and influence people, solve customer problems and promote the company. Celebrities want to build a larger and stronger fan base. It’s similar in some ways but in other ways I think it is different. First off companies are usually coming from behind. They have to win people over. They have to fix customer issues, present a more human face and generally work to improve their image. that means they have to follow more people, use direct messages at times and more directly interact with followers.

Celebrities are building on a relationship where people already like them but that want to see a more personal side. They can interact with each other (other celebrities – apparently conversations between Ashton and Mrs. Kutcher are particularly popular) and less with followers. They don’t have to follow a lot of people themselves. Now if they do interact with followers (and apparently Shaq O'Neil (The_Real_Shaq) does that a lot) so much the better. But more people are probably wondering about what is going on between Mark Cuban (mcuban – owner of the Dallas Mavericks) and Shaq that what he is saying to general fans. (BTW I recommend a blog post by Don Dodge (@dondodge) titled Celebs on Twitter Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Britney Spears top the list for more on how celebrities are using Twitter.)

The edge cases on Twitter these days are probably not the geeks like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki who follow as many people as follow them in large numbers but the people like Ashton Kutcher who are followed by completely insane numbers of people.

This doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t there for the rest of us though. Personally I am loving interacting with a lot of educators, friends, co-workers and even family on Twitter (at AlfredTwo). I’ve avoided most of the celebrities, cut back on the pure tech/geek plays I follow but added some news sources. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with news sources (NY Times, PBS, CNN, etc) on Twitter in particular and online in general over the next year.

I expect to see general business grow as well as informal non-business circles of followers and friends. Twitter is a platform and there is room for a lot of interesting uses there.

Thanks to Twitter  (a Tweet by Angela Maiers) I found a post called Five Twitter Analytics Tools You Might Find Addictive. I’ve tried all five of them and yes they can be addictive. I wrote a little about some of these five plus Twitter counter in an earlier post called Twitter Stats – Entertainment Value Only. If you’ve read that post you  know I am somewhat skeptical of any of these statistic sites but that hasn’t kept me from looking at them from time to time.

So if you are at all interested check out Five Twitter Analytics Tools You Might Find Addictive and get a good basic understanding of what these stats sites offer.

BTW an other site you may find interesting is Reteetist. Retweetist provides statistics on the number of times people’s Tweets are “retweeted” or passed along to new sets of followers. So if you want to get some idea of who or how often things you tweet are retweeted this may be a fun site to play with.

The first thing you have to know is that I am somewhat addicted to statistics. Especially if I am involved at all. So of course statistics for things like my blogs, Facebook, online forums and Twitter take up too much of my personal time. Lately I’ve been looking a lot at Twitter statistics. basically I’m finding them not all that useful. The two big reasons for this is that most of them are opt-in and that the Twitter API limits how much information one can get at a time.

By opt-in I mean that people have to tell the grading services that there is an account that they should  be looking at. TwitterCounter has words on its page that suggest it goes looking for people. Could be but I’m sure they are not finding everyone. So if no one involved with a twitter account tells the service about it then it doesn’t get counted. I suspect that really serious twitter users know about these services and check in on them so it may be that under reporting leans to people who don’t use Twitter that much. Also since one can’t get as much information as one might like on a timely basis there is a long lag time and ratings can easily get out of sync with reality.

But Let’s look at a couple of rating sites.

Twitterholic uses raw follower count to rate Twitter users. The more followers the higher your rating (the lower the rank number). Twitterholic also rates users for locations. This is hard because people are not entering their locations in a consistent format. But they try.

TwitterCounter also just uses follower count for there ranking. If you look at the chart below you will find that my account has a much lower ranking at Twitter Counter than it does at Twitterholic. Clearly Twitter Counter tracks more people. Twitter Counter promises Top 100 lists by location and they seem to usually work for the top 100. Beyond that not so much. There don’t break things down by states but by time zone. A couple of US states are their own time zone though which makes that interesting in a way. On the other hand people are entering time zones in their profiles that have little or no relationship with their actual location. We begin to really understand the problems with location data in Twitter accounts now.

Twinfluence and Twitter.Grader both take the statistics a step or two further. Twinfluence takes into account the number of followers ones followers have. This results in a reach number – the theoretical number of people (ignoring duplicate followers) that a twitter message could reach if every follower sent that message on to their followers. So people whose followers have a lot of followers score higher than those who have a lot of followers who don’t themselves have many followers. Did I lose you yet?

Twitter.Grader uses a similar scheme where the value of your followers is a big part of your own score. This just begs for a recursive mess but it seems to work. Sort of. The thing that stands out here is that my position in the list (raw score) is better in Twinfluence but the percentile I fit into is higher in Twitter.Grader. I’m not sure how to parse that except that Twinfluence probably knows a lot fewer Twitter accounts and the way they rate people is different from Twitter.Grader.

Speaking of other effects of different users being followed. You will notice that Twitterholic rates me as that 13th most followed twitter account but Twitter.Grader ranks me at 24th. This is not because of the way Twitter.Grader ranks people so much as that they know a lot more Twitter accounts than Twitterholic.  All of the people Twitter.Grader shows as higher ranking in the state than me have higher follower counts. Several NH Twitter users who have lower Twitter.Grader scores also have higher follower counts. So the value of the Twitterholic count is marginal in my opinion.

I think these rankings may be of some use for comparison within the tools but not across the tools. Also I think as absolute values they are limited for anything beyond amusement purposes. I’m always looking for other Twitter rating/ranking services BTW so if you know of any drop a comment or Twitter me @alfredtwo.

Now twitter could create good rankings if they wanted to.. They have much easier, faster and more complete access to the data. It could be as simple as rating by followers of course or as complicated as they want. It’s probably an open question as it if there is a good reason for them to do it though. There is plenty of gaming of the system as it is and better ratings might make that worse.

Every so often I start to feel like there is no more room to stuff information in my brain. Today is one of those days. Now I know from experience that given a little time my brain will reorganize things and Ill be able to fit more in. I’m not sure if it tosses stuff away or what. I guess if it tossed information away it would probably do so in a way that I didn’t know it was missing. On the other hand from time to time it occurs to me that I used to know something that I can’t quite seem to remember.

Or maybe there is long term storage in my brain some where and it just takes a while for things to get moved there. A philosophical question perhaps?

None of this would be a problem if I felt like I already knew everything I wanted or even needed to know. But no! There is a lot I still want to learn.

Hopefully I’m just tired and I’ll be fine by Monday. Or maybe I need some time off. Frankly I think that this mental reorganization is what vacations and to some extent sleep are for.  So maybe I should get to bed? :-) No time for vacation just yet.

Anyone else ever feel this way? Is it an age thing do you think? Or am I just mentally deficient? (A claim that I have heard in the past but usually from really stupid people. :-) )

Many years ago, long before most people had Internet access, I was involved in a great many online discussion forums on a company internal network. One of my friends and mentors back then was a man named Simon Szeto. Simon had been born in Hunan province in China, grownup up in Hong Kong and received his university training in the US. We both worked for the same US multi-national company at the time. He was based in Hong Kong at one point (prior to the UK handing Hong Kong back to China) and there were some issues that were creating quite a buzz at the time. Simon had opened an online forum to discuss the issue. Despite the fact that is was primarily a Chinese issue (I forget exactly what it was but I believe it had something to do with concerns about HK returning to China) most of the comments were coming from Americans and Europeans. Simon asked me to help moderate the discussion because the time difference meant that many potential troublesome comments were coming way outside his awake hours.  This was an interesting learning experience for me on several levels. But one thing sticks out above all.

I asked Simon why there was such an imbalance in where the comments were coming from. His reply was “The difference between Chinese people and Americans is that when the Chinese people have nothing to say they say nothing.”

Now I am an American and it is quite true that I have a lot of trouble keeping quiet. Like all too many Americans I seem to always want to put in my 2 cents worth. This is no less true online than it is in person. Still since that early conversation years ago I have tried to only say something when I actually have something to say. With mixed success of course. I confess that too often I give in to the urge to add a “me to!” sort of reply to a post or to create such a post myself. I look at my blog and think “I need to say something today.” I look at Twitter and think “No one has heard from me today.” All with the self absorbed conceit that people are out there waiting for me to say something. It’s part of my personality.

But I also find that the people I respect the most, the people whose opinions/writings are the most useful to me are the people who avoid saying things when they have nothing to say.

The best blogs are not the ones who have ten posts a day or even those who post 6-7 times a week. They are the blogs where a post shows up only when the person has something of value to say – something that adds to the conversation in a material way. There are many prolific bloggers out there who are quoted and linked to regularly that I have just given up on following. The noise to value ration is just not there. Often I see the valuable information they post somewhere else long before it shows up there – Slashdot being a great example BTW. It will show up in the post of someone whose posting rate is lower but whose value proposition is higher.

As I find myself overwhelmed with blog posts to read – caused by insatiable curiosity rather than actual need – I find myself looking at dropping the most prolific of blogs and focusing on value. Does the blogger have something new, original,to say or do they have real added value for the conversation? Are they the first to break news in a new area with a good, fresh explanation of why it matters? Or do they say things even when they have nothing to say? That is the new criteria I am using to narrow down my RSS feeds.

At the same time I look at activity on this blog. I’m writing less. Is that good or bad? Hopefully it means I am wasting less time for people. I see that links to my blog are way down. Is that because I am falling into the trap of saying things when I have nothing to say? Could be. Is it because I am saying less? That could be as well. But the goal should not be to write for volume but for value. Perhaps if I focus on that this blog (and my others as well) will develop a value proposition that will get people to follow, comment and link. And that would be a good thing. But even if the traffic isn’t there the value of the blog to me as a person will be better if I use it only to add to the conversation, to clarify my own thinking with original thought and when I have nothing to say I say nothing. That’s my goal as I rethink and reinvest my time with this blog. Please feel free to keep me honest BTW.

Lately it seems like as soon as I close my eyes at night my mind starts working on blog posts. I start thinking about something and my mind organizes my thoughts in the way they would be organized for a blog. The problem is that I’m really trying to get to sleep so the posts never actually get written. In fact it seems like as soon as I open my eyes and get out of bed the mind shuts down and I lose the whole thought line. Sigh!

So the end result is that mentally I have written a lot of posts but the blogs themselves are not seeing any activity. I’m not sure what this all means.

Has my mind become hard-wired to thinking in 500-1000 word bites? Is this good or bad? I need to think about this.