I told you that it wasn’t just a one-off!

Today’s Twitter List Index features a few changes, I hope that I can call them improvements. Check below for details.
Twitter List Index Nov 3

All of the URLs were cluttering the page, so I’ve removed them and simply hyperlinked the list names. I decided that the related links were extraneous to the purpose of the index, and anyways are easily discovered.

I’ve added a few columns in place of the links. Follow cat. is intended to provide a sense of how highly-followed the list creator’s account is. Category 5 list creators have more than one million followers. Category 4 is more than 100,000 followers, category 3 10,000 followers, category 2 more than 1,000 followers and category 1 has fewer than 1,000 followers. I’ll have a post coming up on why it might be valuable to compare list followings with the list creator’s following.

The lists column denotes how many lists the creating user account is included on. I collect this number daily, but of course it can potentially change substantially in a matter of minutes or hours. Some people have suggested that being included on many lists may be more beneficial to an individual’s social capital than being highly followed. I don’t know what I think about that, but I’ve added the metric for purposes of comparison.

Finally, each entry in the list is color coded to denote any changes in rank since the previous day’s list index. Green indicates a rise in rank, red a demotion, and gray indicates no change in rank. I considered adding more details about the percentage change, or how many ranks up/down a list has moved. Perhaps I will include those in further editions.

I definitely welcome any feedback from readers out there. You can leave comments on the blog, or find me on Twitter as @hornOKplease.

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Filed under: Features
Posted by: Richard
On: Wednesday, November 4th

Twitter lists have rolled out, and there is already a lot of conversation surrounding the feature. Like many, I think that lists will be a big step forward for Twitter in helping to corral conversations and mine the knowledge of subject-area experts. Combined with search and following, lists provide another vector for contextualizing information on the network.

Much of the early discussion on Twitter lists has focused on aspects of the social capital that is granted to users that find themselves placed on numerous lists. Already, there are dozens, or even hundreds, of users that can boast of being on more than 1,000 lists. Declarations of listings being the new followings are pouring down from the rafters, and indeed there are clear social consequences to being singled out individually as having some characteristic that earns you a spot on such a list.

But while I have so often before been happy to theorize to my heart’s content, in the case of lists I wanted to try something more proactive. I am going to embark on a project to monitor the most-followed lists and see what insights can be drawn from their movements. Taking inspiration from that list of lists that has attempted to draw meaning out of the chaos of the market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I decided to create a Twitter Lists Index of 30 entries.

Twitter List Index Nov 2

The Twitter Lists Index will be compiled daily by me. The list shall consist of the 30 most-followed lists on Twitter, beginning with the most-followed and descending to the 3oth most-followed. In addition to the number of followers that a list has, the number of users that it itself follows will be included, as well as the username of the creator of the list and any relevant link to an official blog or other social media presence.

The means of compiling the list shall be subject to change and improvements moving forward. I have used a combination of sources for the inaugural Twitter Lists Index, including a script from Vobios and figures from Listorious. In all cases I have referred to list pages on Twitter to get the most up-to-date follower numbers. Obviously, these can change over time.

I’m quite interested to see what happens with Twitter Lists, and have a lot of other thoughts to share about the early batch of influential Twitter Lists. Let me know what you think about the subject in the comments, and please consider following me at @hornokplease.

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Filed under: Announcements, Features
Posted by: Richard
On: Tuesday, November 3rd

Time has got to be the most valuable commodity that there is. With only so many minutes in a day, days in a year, and years in a lifetime, we seek to optimize our finite hours as best we can. Humanity has developed a number of methods to manage time, including creating mechanisms to measure it, and communication technologies to conquer it. Information sharing has always occurred among and between communities, but the rate of sharing has grown faster and faster thanks to developments like language, writing, printing, telegraphy, photography and radio, among others.

Serving this growth in information sharing has been a long tradition of journalism, in which private individuals and organizations would take it upon themselves to record events and facts for the purpose of sharing that information with the public via the contemporary communication technologies. Investigating and exposing stories of public interest is an important job of journalism, but another role that has traditionally been equally important has been to use its editorial judgment to function as a reputable agenda-setter in public discourse.

In our contemporary setting, the traditional media’s ability to set the agenda is diminishing, and nowhere does this seem more clear to me than in the lamentable over-extension of the definition of ‘breaking news’. Breaking news as we know it dates to the radio era, and was used sparingly – only when the significance of the story was such that it warranted interrupting the scheduled broadcast. One could convincingly argue that breaking news is platform neutral, and that news ‘breaks’ when it is first learned by a given individual, but I will stick with radio as the example of the first mass media communication technology to engage in the practice of delivering breaking news bulletins.

Today, however, news organizations have established channels of communication that are devoted to ‘breaking news’ – I receive ‘breaking news’ alerts by SMS from the likes of the New York Times and CNN, and of course Twitter has gained much notoriety for providing breaking news alerts. In this situation, the context of ‘breaking news’ transforms itself. It is no longer the late-arriving information that is of cardinal importance and must interrupt the scheduled broadcast. It is, instead, now merely the latest information that the editors think you should know, even if the information is not so significant that they would have interrupted an old-fashioned broadcast to share it.

One could argue that the questionable editorial judgment shown on these new “breaking news” feeds does not measure up to that of earlier generations of broadcasters, but I think that this misses the point. What is more significant is that Breaking News has come to be more about freshness than importance, and this reflects the way in which time has become of ever greater value in a communication paradigm where news travels across the globe in a keystroke. In a culture that values ‘newness’ over significance, then it will always be a race to be the first to publish – even if that often means racing to publish inane nonsense.

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Filed under: Features, Journalism
Posted by: Richard
On: Thursday, August 27th

Trends are very trendy right now. In an effort to develop a couple of short features for the blog, I’ve settled on a regular post exploring what I recognize to be emerging trends in network identity, digitization, globalization and the other themes that inform this blog.

So here’s the first entry in that series: Microcelebrity

The notion of microcelebrity was first spelled out years ago by Clive Thompson at Wired. In his words, Microcelebrity is “the phenomenon of being extremely well known not to millions but to a small group.” In its first iteration, it was mostly linked to personalities that used the web to build a toehold in the discourse of popular culture, and was typically fodder for blogs and some unscrupulous print rags.

Now, however, I see the notion of microcelebrity taking root. There is the obvious reference to Twitter power-users getting increasing visibility as content concierges, but I am more interested of late in the use of microcelebs in marketing and promotional campaigns online because it suggests to me that businesses see real potential to profit through these strategies. Here are three recent examples to illustrate the trend:

1. Carl’s Jr. recently launched a campaign employing YouTube microcelebs to promote their new $6 Portobello Burger.

2. Ford’s Fiesta Movement campaign to promote the new product line employs 100 ‘Agents of the Fiesta Movement’ to blog, vlog and otherwise share their experience with the car.

3. JetBlue is trying to build buzz for their new service to LAX from JFK and BOS with a planeload of social media microcelebs who will create and upload content during the inaugural journey.

While these are only a couple examples, industry watchers do believe that social media spending will continue to grow while display ads decline. This may be a happy medium for now between direct connection with individual customers (which has had some messy consequences before) and the lofty and unreachable heights of ‘proper’ celebrities who are more picky about endorsement deals. You can expect more campaigns of this type in the future.

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Filed under: Announcements, Features
Posted by: Richard
On: Friday, June 19th