I’m approaching my 10,000th entry, or Tweet, on Twitter. I have a little over 400 to go before I hit that milestone. As I pondered this, as I do every few days, a new thought occurred to me: maybe 10,000 is enough. Maybe I should quit Twitter at 10,000 and say “good enough, then.” After all, that’s a lot of Tweets. And, if I really wanted to, I could probably hit that milestone in a day or two if I worked at it for several hours per day.

Then I thought: if I’m setting an upper limit, this means that I have a finite number of Tweets to use. How would I use them wisely?

This is the type of thought that most people NEVER have when using social media. After all, the sky’s the limit, right?

Social media, Web 2.0, the modern Internet – it’s all about abundance. There are few limits on what you can do, what you can say, and who you can connect with on the Internet. The only price you need pay is your time. Otherwise, you can create as much content as you want, whenever you want.

I think this abundance could be a problem. Or an opportunity, if we think creatively about it.

When we can generate dozens or hundreds of entries per day with a Twitter account, what happens to the value of a single Tweet? It’s true that some communications have more value than others if we send helpful, useful, or at least entertaining links to our network of Twitter users, blog readers, or Facebook Friends. And heck, if we’re feeling generous and ambitious we can spit out all kinds of useful information in a matter of minutes.

Here’s the problem, though.

Who can keep up with it all? More importantly, who will bother to keep up with it all? Especially if they know that there’s plenty of more Tweets coming from you soon.

Maybe a little bit of scarcity would do us all some good these days.

Why write 20, 40, 100 Tweets or more a day? No one will keep up with them all. Why not just write one? You can even cheat if you want and put a link in your Tweet to a web page or blog post that contains all of the myriad goodness that you want to share with the world.

Some of you will argue that this kind of thinking ignores the conversational nature of applications like Twitter and FriendFeed, which allow you to broadcast, share, and converse with many people in a single stream. Each bit of connection takes a Tweet, an IM message, an E-Mail, or a post of some kind. But which is more valuable: saying hi to 3000 people today or having useful, in depth conversations with two of them?

The advantage of a Twitter or FriendFeed is that it’s a single place where you can accomplish a whole lot of communication and sharing (FriendFeed trades ease of use for more functionality; it also has a much smaller userbase than Twitter). There are plenty of ways to search and filter our output so that people can only see the parts that they want to see. But, it’s still jumbled together in the same stream and the more that you share in a period of time, the more work you create for your followers.

There’s a tendency for bloggers, micro-bloggers and social media users in general to do MORE. To write MORE. To share MORE. Does this mean that everything is of equal value to everyone who follows our stuff? Of course not. It seems like we share a wide variety of stuff on the Web with the hopes that our followers will at least find one or two useful and interesting items, much in the way that record companies, book publishers, and magazine editors release a variety of content in the hopes that at least some of it will find a sizable audience. Much like a fisherman with multiple nets or fishing lines, they’re putting a lot of stuff out there at once, hoping to catch at least some fish. And hey, it certainly works for a lot of fishermen: that’s why they do it.

But, when everyone’s a fisherman and everyone’s fishing in the same spots, they’re still competing over the same number of fish. But hey, if the gear’s free, why not, right?

How about the opposite question, though: why do it? Have we forgotten to question or at least examine the abundance of the Free Web?

If you knew you only had 400 Tweets left, how would you use them? Once you figure that out, try removing that restriction. Maybe it would make sense to look at each Tweet as your last: wouldn’t you use them more wisely? And wouldn’t that be a benefit to you, and your followers, right now?

Doing something different today – I created an audio blog entry and it’s stored at Utterz. It’s an MP3 file, about 11 minutes long, but you can listen to it directly without downloading it to your computer.

Here’s the link to the entry:

Broadcasting Brain Aug 7 2008 – about names

I hope you enjoy this change of pace!

Note: The book that I mention in this audio blog entry is:

The Making of a Name – The Inside Story of the Brands That We Buy

by Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland.

Is it all smoke and mirrors or is there any substance to it after all? Or are there just a bunch of hucksters out there trying to make a few bucks off naive people who want to get ahead in life? Is social media just next iteration in hucksterism and pyramid style marketing scams? Or is it something more?

Greg Davies, aka CGT2099 of social news fame, wrote a heated, yet insightful post critiquing the use of the phrase “social media”. As you may recall in last week’s Q&A post, Greg basically said that it’s just the Internet; social media is just a buzzword.

Greg aims pretty clearly at a key constituency who he blames for the hype behind social media:

The individuals I am talking about are those who claim they are knowledgeable about Social Media. It is the biggest con of the 21st century, folks: they create a buzz word, convince you that it exists, persuade you that you and/or your business needs it, and then convinces every person that they are so competent in the area that you can afford to pay them lots of cash to be your “Social Media Consultant”.

You know, he’s got a good point, although I do think he’s generalizing a bit. Greg’s not bashing the medium as a whole, though. He acknowledges that there are some people using the new tools smartly and effectively. However, he does spew a fair amount of bile towards people in the “make money online” and blog monetization segments of the world.

Whether or not you agree with his article, I think Greg brings up some excellent points and serves to put a bit of a reality check in place. If you’re new to social media and you have dreams of becoming rich and famous, or you know someone who is, I’d recommend that they read Greg’s article just to get some perspective. You don’t have to agree with him, but you should at least consider what he’s saying.

Empress Eve and Dave III were kind enough to let me guest post at their fantabulous blog Geeks of Doom, devoted to many things fantastic and geeky.

My guest post is humbly entitled 10 Ways To Make a Kick Ass Version of Space:1999. It’s based on the 1970’s TV show, which I talked about in a previous Broadcasting Brain blog post about keeping old flames burning bright.

Please have a look at my Geeks of Doom guest post and don’t forget to give it a Digg or a Stumble if you like it.

P.S. The post really doesn’t have much to do with social media, but they did a great job of adding additional images and stuff to beef up my words.

Unfortunately, I don’t have my laptop here with me, my usual writing platform. I’ve actually been reading (from paper) most of the evening.

In conjunction with the podcasts that I’ve been sampling and some of the other browsing that I’ve been doing, I’ve been reading up on a couple of blogs.

GestureLab

Newsgang

Steve Gillmor.

After Steven Hodson’s (WinExtra’s) commentary about one of Gillmor recent Techcrunch posts, I was intrigued enough to read up on SG.

I’m continually in (virtual) school these days and Gillmor’s stuff is … educational. To me, anyway. His writing is not easy reading at the best of times because there’s a fair amount of underlying context that’s not immediately visible, but which does reveal itself in bits and pieces over time.

I like reading something with character, even when I might not agree with it or understand it.

EDIT:  the written Gillmor is a different experience from the podcasting Gillmor.

Any suggestions on other people that I should be reading in the realm of technology, etc?

You may well be laughing at me for writing such an odd title for this post and I don’t blame you. Bloggers are known for their ideas, writing skills, multi-media expertise, and often their wit, but most of us aren’t known for good looks, physical prowess, or heroic deeds.

A profession that requires you to spend a lot of time inside, sitting on your bum, and developing carpal tunnel syndrome doesn’t exactly pass most tests of coolness (although it does bear some resemblance to car racing when you look at it the right way…)

NASCAR driver are walking billboards and their cars are billboards on wheels. Look at your average stock car or driver’s uniform and you’ll see that there’s barely any space for color: cars and uniforms are covered in logos and company names of several different sizes.

Some of the logos are quite recognizable and show up very well on TV. But some of them… you’d need a telescope to see them from a short distance. They’re positively tiny compared to their larger neighbours. There’s virtually no chance that anyone’s ever going to see or recognize those logos, but they are there in spades.

I’m not writing this post to advocate selling every pixel of blank space on your blog for ads. What’s the value for sponsoring something when no one can see your ad? However, seeing those tiny ads made me thing about the bigger ads and about how NASCAR drivers make a lot of their money. I think there’s an opportunity for bloggers to monetize themselves in a different way than most do today: through bigger, longer term sponsorships.

Consider:

• You can place an ad on someone’s blog and it’s a simple business transaction that might have no lasting value.
• Or, you could be a sponsor of a blog and that entails something different. Sponsorship could be a longer term relationship and support for the sponsored.

There’s also another possibility, a reason why people buy tiny ads on racing uniforms and cars. You know what that is?

Bragging rights. Some people will take any opportunity to be associated with greatness. That’s where the small ads come in. And the really big ads, too.

Think about it. It could be good for the blogger and the advertiser. It might not be something that many bloggers have the pull to do, but who knows? Maybe it’s worth checking out?

Just make sure you wear your seatbelt. And a helmet. Because falling asleep at your keyboard can be hazardous to your health.