broadstuff

Went to the Open Government Mashup yesterday afternoon, couldn't make the morning session but I made it in time for the session on Challenges for Engagement, (the Twitterstream is on #opengov) and it was a microcosm of the opportunity - and barriers - to Open Government.

And there was some very stirring stuff, but (and this, a they say, is a big but) - I think the people at the session shied away from dealing with a really big issue which in my view can scupper a lot of potential initiatives, which is the risk/liability culture. This was best expressed by Chris Thorpe, Developer Advocate for the Guardian Open Platform when he noted that if early man had to deal with the risk assessment issues Government does, he'd have never come down from the trees. "Risk is like Kryptonite" said another

The issue can be encapsulated by one rather good example - a crowdsourced rubbish collection, pot-hole filling etc service (see picture above) in which people can take pictures of and then report potholes, and these are then featured on a council website. Brilliant, you would think. Not so fast, noted Sharon Cooper, DirectGov Director of Strategy & Product Design - there are all sorts of worries about council liability for people reporting them and then getting injured by tripping on them, for example.

Update - good correction in the comments from Paul Clarke:

As I remember, Sharon's point was a more subtle one than just the wider risks and liabilities that web exposure may generate.

The example was one of openness and community involvement going a step further than just reporting: if defects are openly discoverable AND citizens (organising as volunteers) start to repair them themselves with spade and gravel, then a whole new class of liabilities arise when the fix suddenly caves in.

This is not to say there is not a lot of great work being done, the last session of the day had some great examples of services being worked on. and a lot of opportunity to free up services. But, as Thaler and Sunstein note in their book "Nudge" on the game theory of choice architectures, if eventually all these services hit the issues of risk and liability then there will be very severe limitations.

I felt there was a bit of resistance in the room when I aired these views - after all, its a hard problem to fix and vendors prefer to go on vending, enthusiasts to be enthusiastic etc - but systemically it is the major barrier to major change in my view. There are two plays strategically:

- Chip away at the risk culture directly, expose it for its ridiculous extremes and unravel it. Systems people know that cost of near zero risk goes up geometrically!

- Work around it by launching services elsewhere that will then undermine it.

We need to do both. I look forward to the next Open Government Evening Debate

Upate - 50 other barriers to Open Government over here - We Shall Overcome!

Yesterday TechCrunch UK ran the Geek n Rolla event, mainly for new technology startups but also covering some other elements. My main interest was to see whether the startup community had taken notice of The Crunch, and what had changed from the go-go times of a year ago.

I was tied up in the morning so only arrived in time for a fairly interesting (in all senses of the word) panel on Women in Tech. The issue of "why there are fewer women in Tech than men" crops up perennially and usually circles round with no conclusion. No change this time, but the ante was upped by the Daily Telegraph's Milo Yiannopolous taking the contrarian, un-PC, (and inaccurate in my experience) "its natural that men are better at some things and its OK". Gets you fired from Harvard but got Milo mild admonitions and (according to him anyway) lots of private support.

Ah well.....I go back to Janet Parkinson's work last autumn in Berlin which showed that there are more women on-web than men, controlling more spend, and they use the quite Web differently - so anyone who designs applications for what women want has probably got a competitive advantage that most (male built) sites will never understand. I recall Wired's Ben Hammersley going hammer and tongs at her in Berlin when all she had done was assembled a basic fact base of these things (see the link above) , so there is clearly something deeply visceral in some men about admitting all this stuff, which Milo clearly tapped.

Anyway, what about the Crunch? There were quite a few useful talks on this:

- William Reeve, an experienced entrepreneur, gave a rational and dispassionate analysis of how two companies in the same space (Lovefilm vs Screen Direct) can be so totally differently run, and the difference between a bootstrapping culture and getting too much funding too early. He also touched on designing for scalability early, a drum we bang too. William's talk is online here.

- Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme on getting Angel funding, and how it was like herding cats. He also talked about how all negotiations can change up to and including the last minute, and the issues around board structure with multiple angels.

- Lesley Eccles of Hubdub outlined their strategy of running a company from Scotland but aiming at the US market "because thats where the money is" (from the large customer base and funders. Proves that you don't have to be SV based to take US money.

- Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp went through the funding models of their funded companies. I was quite amused to see "Freemium" has now replaced "Advertising" as the business model de jure (see this post on the Seedcamp companies from last year) - I hope it works out for them, as its a far from proven model. Reshma and others noted that all the evidence is that "Freemium" has to be designed in from the beginning.

- Fred Destin of Atlas talked about getting VC money in tough times - team, tech and market size important as always but I heard much more focus on "show me the money" in the business model than has been prevalent in the last few years. Also, us Europeans are far too polite vs the Israelis, Indians and Americans

As always there is the socialisation, I throughly enjoyed the Pizza n Rolla dinner some of us had afterwards before the obligatory apres conference party (Geek n Rolla Ball?) - nice to meet existing Twitterfriends in person as well as FOWA's Ryan Carson. And clearly if this whole sector collapses then TechCrunch's Mike Butcher has a budding second career if his performance on the drums is anything to go by.

Interesting article in the WSJ today about the benefits of blogging:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work ,and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's.

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as "spokesbloggers" -- paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around -- but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.

The barriers to entry couldn't be lower. Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars. But a subgroup of these bloggers are the true professionals who work at corporations, serve as highly paid blogging consultants or write for sites with substantial traffic.

Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours -- 50 to 60 hours a week.

eConsultancy is a bit sniffy about the analysis:

The first glaring problem: he uses a hodgepodge of sources to come up with his argument. He assumes there are 20m bloggers (based on data from eMarketer), assumes 1.7m of them profit from their blogging (based on information promoted by BlogWorldExpo) and assumes that 2% of the bloggers out there can earn a 'living' from their blogs (based on Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Report).

But the biggest problem here is not just the hodgepodge of data. It's that the basis for many of his claims is Technorati's State of the Blogosphere Report, which was sent to a random sample of Technorati users and which was based on less than 1,300 self-completed responses.

Assuming that 2% of the approximately 20m people who are estimated to have 'blogged' at some point in the US equates to 452,000 professional bloggers simply because 2% of the 1,300 bloggers who responded to Technorati's survey can reportedly earn a living blogging is the definition of fuzzy math.

All very proper and correct, but a tad unfair - if all analyses that melded different samples to get a high level picture of "markets that hardly exist for products only recently invented" was barred then the only available analysis would be prohibitively expensive, too late to be useful, and without the results necessarily being much different anyway (oh wait, e-Consultancy is a market research company.... ) One of the first things anybody who deals with the maths of emerging markets learns is to be able to make rough estimates within reasonable bounds from sketchy data, and then look at what you have to believe for it to be valid and test for the sensitivities. Rather, take this as a first stake in the ground and then compare it with more data as it emerges.

(Update - lots of other blogs have clamped on criticizing the numbers, some of whom are not above playing fast and loose themselves at times . To them I'd say put up or shut up - if you feel the numbers are drastically wrong, lets see the counter evidence.)

The big picture here, irrespective of the precise numbers, is that we are seeing a shift in how text media is produced and emerging evidence that the new model can pay its way. This has some major ramifications on some assumptions we make about what we are reading - not all are good news. The WSJ again:

Almost no blogging is by subscription; rather, it owes it economic model to on-line advertising. Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites. Some sites even pay writers by the click, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed.

The United Kingdom has just had a major scandal in which an official at 10 Downing Street had planned to leak to a friendly blogger all sorts of lurid stories about the Conservatives, complete with descriptions of secret sex tapes. But all of it was to be made up, and the friendly blogger who was going to post it all thought it was an "absolutely brilliant" idea.

I always observed that the poll that often got the most coverage was the one that was different from the others, regardless of whether it was right, or whether the pollster had any track record. This is true with opinions, too: those on the extreme right or left, or those that are the most titillating, seem to drive the most traffic through their sites. The center doesn't seem to have either the edge or the passion to grab the same kind of traffic.

In other words, you will need to be far more wary of what you read in blogs, as they are far more likely to be "Advertorial" than "Editorial", Opinion rather than fact led, and extreme rather than centre-ist.

Its easy for 'Netheads to dismiss this downside diatribe as the mad meanderings of Olde Media hacks under pressure, but unfortunately, and uncomfortably, its largely and demonstrably far more true than the Blogosphere adherents are wont to admit. As with all new, high growth areas it is still somewhat "Wild West".

The interesting thing will be to see if this Wild West, like most previous ones, is eventually tamed, how, when, and by whom. The unfortunate thing for Mainstream media is that it will probably not be in time to prevent its large scale reduction in size.

There is a certain delicious irony in an article by Sarah Lacy, on TechCrunch*, calling for bloggers to "band together to stop the hype cycle" in new technology.

The Tech Hypegrrl in the Tech Hypeblog callling for the End of Hype.... we'll follow your advice - if you go first .

However, the bigger question needs to be examined, ie is Sarah actually right when she says the hype cycle must be stopped?

I read a very interesting argument a few years back that the hype cycle's role was to counter the "Machiavelli effect" - the human tendency to give lukewarm support of the new and the strong backing of the status quo. In order to overcome this effect, the promotion of the New New Thing has to be far more than a fact based argument, and has to be almost religious in its nature - it needs faith based belief, rather than rational understanding to overcome the status quo bias.

In other words, without the hype and the faith based belief, there would be a far slower diffusion of new technologies - certainly not fast enough to underpin the Sand Road Ecosystem.

One can argue whether this is a good or a bad thing - as a rationality based strategic technology consultancy we find it hard to dispel irrational belief systems in the space (cf Freeconomics) - in fact it was given a name in the dotcom era - Techolibertarianism, but it has evolved to be a major driver of change. And, having been involved in 2 decades worth of trying to create change in large enterprises, the alternative is stultifying stagnation.

* Or TwitterCrunch, as it is better called these days - 74 mentions in 12 days!

Sad news that JG Ballard died today. One of my personal favourite authors, especially for his dystopian Sci-Fi. May he rest in Vermilion Sands......

Very interesting story from the Sunday Times, (seen initially on TechCrunch UK) about the setup of European Founders Capital (EFC):

EFC is being led by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, and Brent Hoberman, who set up the dotcom bubble era Lastminute.com but is better known more recently for being a serial angel investor and co-founder of MyDeco.

They are joined by Rogan Angelini-Hurll, an old friend friend of Hoberman’s and former City research analyst at Salomons. Peter Dubens, who built the Pipex ISP business, is also backing the venture. Dubens sold Pipex’s broadband business to Tiscali for £210m in 2007.

EFC will have an initial £20m of seed funding but is aiming for £50m in total. The idea is to increase the availability of early-stage funding in Europe, which historically lags behind the US, and has led to a gap between early stage and Series A funding. Europe’s seed funding eco-system has never matched Silicon Valley’s in part because the business angel environment for technology is undeveloped and because European VCs have historically not reached much lower than Series A rounds, unless in syndication with other parties.

Nice move, as its aimed squarely at the "Equity Gap" between "friends & fools" and VC funding, which is a real issue in the UK (as we have pointed out repeatedly).

There is also a bigger discussion that this news needs to be seen as part of, ie the restructuring of the global Venture Capital market (see this recent article by Sarah Lacy as an example of the issue) but thats a whole 'nother post.

Anyway, I hope the boyz will do well by doing good

At the Digital Britain summit yesterday, BT's Ian Livingstone made the comment that Britain needed digital roads for Fords, not Ferraris. Notes El Reg:

"Of course a Ferrari is faster than a Ford," Livingstone said. "But most people are happy with a Ford."

BT has so far committed £1.5bn to roll fibre out as far as streetside cabinets, connecting about 40 per cent of premises by 2012. The upgrade will offer speeds of up to 40Mbit/s per second downstream, short of the more than 100Mbit/s fibre optic lines into homes and businesses could deliver. Livingstone said there weren't enough applications that needed such speeds. "Ultimately it's about what people will pay for," he said. "The economic case is not great."

He is both right, and wrong. He is right on both counts in the short term:

(i) There are not (yet) applications that need such speeds.

(ii) The Economic case is not great.

However, he is also wrong looking into the medium term - the history of the internet is that bandwidth and applications are linked in a DNA-like helix. To a large extent, "Web 2.0" is an expression of what can be done once early broadband existed. Video applications like iPlayer and YouTube are now pushing that bandwidth generation to its limit. Cometh the next ramp up of bandwidth, cometh the next raft of applications.

And thus cometh the economic business case..... but to get those pipes, now, will require some government arm twisting.

But also underlying this worry is something that does massively threaten the economics of the rollout, which is the Universal Service Obligation (USO) - the requirement that every citizen needs to be plumbed into Digital Britain. El Reg again:

Virgin Media chief executive Neil Berkett said that his firm's investment plans, along with those of BT, meant policy should focus on how to bring next generation access to rural areas where the return on investment would be poor.

"Digital Britain is about Digital Britain, not digital cities," he said.

This is another way of saying what no-one wants to say outright - that getting c 66% national coverage costs in commercially, getting 80% probably doesn't but is affordable, and getting 100% will be ridiculously expensive - and thus the bill must be footed by the government (who, unfortunately have handed all the lolly to the banks without gaining control, and the banks are now not - predictably enough - giving it back in investment).

The Digital Britain report assumes that a 2Mb downlink pipe is acceptable for USO, and all the (independent) analysis says it probably is for the bulk of services - but as you can imagine, a plethora of special interest groups have popped up demanding a Digital Superhighway past every home no matter how far, poor or useful it is. And given that they are busy seizing the moral high ground with a vice-like grip, its a brave politician who will gainsay them. Thus the worry by the infrastructure players is that they will be left with the bill after the government passes a Digital Britain Bill later this year.

So, allow us to say the unsayable - give us your poor, you dispossessed etc etc and we will tell them that unfortunately, in the beginning they are going to get the Digital Country Lanes. There has been no major infrastructure buildout in history, from canals to roads to sewers to telephones to the internet, where this has not been the case. If the Digital Britain report had come out at a time when HMG was flush with cash then maybe history could have been diverted, but its come out when Our Leader is staring into the face of a Great Recession with all the money gone.

How to ameliorate - the original rollouts of previous networks had public access points - taps on street corners, lanes to the roads, telephone boxes etc. This will have to be the first approach - how about using libraries and not shutting all those rural post offices so there can be high speed access. The other thing is to roll out local wireless broadband - imagine if every village church in the land was a wireless broadband tranceiver... the ley-line fans may still be proved to be on the right (straight) track.

The Pirate Bay Four have been given a year in jail and a £2m fine. As the Telegraph notes:

Mark Mulligan, an analyst with Forrester Research, said The Pirate Bay had positioned itself as a sort of 21st-century “digital Robin Hood”, stealing from “fat cat media companies” to redistribute creative wealth among the “poor consumers”. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, one of the defendants, called himself “captain in Sweden’s battle against corporate America”, a view that enraged the entertainment industry.

The fact remains, though, that The Pirate Bay is simply the latest in a long line of filesharing websites against whom legal action has been taken, and yet the levels of online piracy shows no signs of abating. The prosecution of Napster almost a decade ago was supposed to nip piracy in the bud; instead, canny web users have simply found other ways to swap music and videos, be it through instant-messages or emails, or sharing hard drives and music libraries.

To quote Ben Ellis, I'm afraid my take (at the risk of universal booing from the tech blogosphere) is that these guys were as much Robbin' Hoods as Robin Hoods, in that Robin Hood gave the money to the poor whereas they were definitely in it for the money themselves.

Nonetheless, the judgement opens up some very interesting questions:

Pirate Bay did not itself host any of these files, it did provide links to other websites and torrent services where music and films could be illegally acquired. Nonetheless, the court ruling has fundamentally asserted the right of media companies to have their creative copyright internationally recognised and upheld, and to exploit this material as they see fit for financial benefit. It has also clearly demonstrated that even those websites which do not host illegal material, but simply point to it, can be held responsible for subsequent copyright infringement.

One wonders how this will impact Google........... its stock was up a bit today, so clearly at the moment the markets see no impact. I suspect everyone is waiting to see what the outcome after the appeals process is. (Update - Forbes ran quite a long article on this later in the day)

Big picture of course is the longer term game....as Mike Masnick points out, this is a very Pyrrhic victory as it stands:

....the entertainment industry will gleefully declare victory, and make statements about how this is a major victory against "piracy." But, in actuality, the exact opposite of that will occur. Unauthorized file sharing continues (or even increases) and it becomes that much more difficult for the legacy industries to win back customers and embrace these new, useful and efficient tools of distribution and promotion. It's a classic case of winning the battle and losing the war. The ultimate problem, of course, is that the entertainment industry still (amazingly) thinks this is a legal issue, not a business model one.

I'm pretty much out of step with the 'Net Freeconomists in that I believe a sustainable endgame has to have the content creators getting paid, and it must work without aggregators being able to come in and rob them of income sans recourse. As Sly Bailey pointed out at Digital Britain today, its galling enough that people read your expensive-to-produce content via Google, but when Google makes all the Ad money and not you it really adds insult to injury. The longer term issue is that if content creators can't live from their art, they will eventually exit and we will be all the poorer because a few interim aggregators got a lot richer.

But this as it stands solves nothing, as no doubt another Pirate Bay will be up and running in weeks if not days...... but the endgame here if piracy continues to be rife may not be something anyone wants - PC Mag:

A few weeks ago, the European Union's IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) became law in Sweden, forcing ISPs to reveal the names and IP addresses of copyright violators. The next day, Internet traffic in Sweden dropped 30 percent. As a response, the founders of The Pirate Bay are introducing an anonymizing VPN service, IPREDator, that conceals your ISP address. The irony is that by charging $5 per month for the IPREDator service, these guys will make more money than they ever did by simply posting BitTorrent trackers. So far they've amassed more than 100,000 pre-launch sign-ups.

......I believe that some form of variable pricing could make sense, but the plans put forth by Time Warner, Comcast, and others smack more of greedy profiteering than fair metering of broadband access. They would make P2P file trading too costly—it's estimated that downloading an HD movie would cost between $5 and $25, just for the bandwidth.

Problem is, the more the arms race is left to run, the worse the endgame will be for the users. There is, in my view, an argument that says to the whole supply chain "look, charge a decent price and most people won't pirate things" - but gouging prices from the industry and a freeconomic play by the pirates is not sustainable, stable or desirable.

Sadly, the game theory here is a classic Prisoner's Dilemma - both sides win if the other loses and its almost impossible to imagine a scenario where they collaborate - so they will refuse to co-operate, at the expense of the overall game and to bot htheir detriments.

Today was the day of the Digital Britain Summit, the idea being that panels of luminaries were to enlighten us in our thinking about the British Digital SuperHighway. I couldn't go, so listened in for part of the afternoon on the Video livestream (when it was up it was excellent, it struggled earlier in the day, and it also has a superb liveblog at that link) and dipped in every so often to the Twitterstream.

As far as being a Summit, it was more a grassy knoll, as there was a very little presented to take us to new heights of understanding. I was intending to write a longer post initially, but in reality most of what was said has been said and done before:

- The "on-stage" day was a procession of the existing power players arguing in various degrees that their pole position/role on the greasy pyramid should be protected, by regulation if needs be.

- The "off-stage" day on the Twitterstream was good in parts, but also unfortunately heavily trafficked by power player wannabees arguing the Old Guard should all get out the way, NOW!, or muppets regurgitating the Californian Pseudobabble that passes as considered thinking in too much of the New Media space!

- Too many of the "questions" followed SXSW malpractice of "Pimp yo'self then launch into a long winded diatribe of your own" so there was little insight there. Guy Kawasaki's SXSW model of $20 to ask a question (or say your piece in 30 seconds then sit down) needs to be enforced.

All in all, glad I wasn't there - except for the networking, of course (Or as some wag* put it, you could tell the real Digital Britons as they were the ones not attending physically )

Things that stood out for me as key for the next round of this report were :

- How shall it be executed - Lord Carter came very close to calling for a more government regulated model (as opposed to market force aka large company oligopoly model) as we've seen in Asia, and as France, Scandinavia and now Australia have shifted to. He was largely alone up there on this, and demurred from saying it outright....

- How will it be funded - Gordon Brown clearly wanted us to have a Digital Future in his keynote - but as all the money has been given away to prop up the banks, how will it be paid for? This was never directly addressed, but the Consumer's pocket seemed to be the unspoken assumption on the day. Maybe we need Broadband Bonds, like there were once Railway Bonds?

- Who gets what access - Round and Round the Universal Service Obligation we went again, especially access for The Digital Poor, with no one prepared to point out the unpalatable and un-PC elements about the cost vs benefits of doing this. Everyone knows its practically impossible of course, but it seems everyone wants someone else to be lumbered with having to address the issue (so they can snipe while secretly being relieved that their taxes aren't disappearing down a bottomless pit ).

My take on the process so far is that the risk that the whole Digital Britain thing becomes a corporate stitch up is still quite high, and there is every risk they will thus build the wrong things for the wrong reasons (Think red flags in front of early automobiles, to redact the Digital Highway example). I think Carter understands this, but there are some very vested interests on and around the Digital Britain advisory board.

For The People, Stephen Fry was one of the few people onstage who was (i) powerful enough to have an impact on institutional thinking and (ii) actually understands how the whole new media system works. I would like to believe that The People could collectively find The Wisdom to put a coherent competing strategy together, but my experience of today and previous public pow-wows on the topic is that they can't. There is just too much noise from New Mogul wannabees, muppets, empty vessels etc to get anything coherent going - passion is all very well, but not when one needs to get productive.

And, as we noted before after the first report, the endgame has some inescapable but not universally popular outcomes:

(i) Market Forces won't do the infrastructure buildout, it will need a Deus ex Machina and that is visible hand of the Government in some form

(ii) The consumer won't pay, but its an excellent use of bailout money. I suggest the banks all get strong armed into buying Broadband Bonds with the money the taxpayers gave them.

(iii) 100% access at full service levels is impossible and probably not needed - Telcos rolled out phone boxes, we have Libraries, etc - all these are interim technologies for the digital dispossessed until prices fall.

But it dos need a wider input than the current report.

So - how to get The Vox Populi productively engaged - Amplified is a start for information gathering, but it is a conversation mechanism and not a structure for designing a considered response. To my mind one needs something like the existing Digital Britain Report structure, but with other more representative players in it. I'd be happy for Lord Carter to chair both, in fact, but certainly the members would need to be drawn from a broader cross section.


*that was me, actually - to wind up all those who had got up early to go

There are many guides out the that promise to increase your follower count on Twitter, but here at Broadsight Towers we have conducted actual fact based research on the subject and quantified the most effective strategies. They are, in order of importance:

Top 5

1. Be Famous Already - nothing succeeds like existing success, how you get it is irrelevant. As all Slebs know, Fame follows the Wildean Law, in that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

2. Run for President - works like a charm. Drawback is it can only be done every 4 years or so and requires lots of rubber chicken dinners.

3. Get onto the Twitter Recommended User list - for new joiners, Twitter is a scary place and your name in lights on the onramp is a must have. Rumours that you have to bribe the Twitter founders are cruel and untrue, you only need bribe one of them*

4. If you are not famous, have a famous spouse/significant other/ex - and play that connection to the skies. Alternatively, why not just use someone famous's Twitter name before they do - after all, even Twitter "experts" Twitterpartners didn't claim their own name . And you can even sell it back to them.

5. Buy as much PR as you can - being famous is all very well, but to really hit the million follower numbers you need Big PR pimping you up to the nines - penniless sycophants just don't cut it in the last hard yards to the Oprah Winfrey show.

Bottom 5 - for those not yet Famous

6. Pimp Yo' Self - Never forsake an opportunity to demand/ask/beg people to follow you. No act of self promotion should be beneath you in this quest.

7. Follow Everybody - some of the twerps will follow you back automatically, and the Twitter Social Capital counters don't differentiate between those people with genuine high follow/followed ratios and those who are just Follower Ho's

8. Flatter those more famous than yourself, constantly - the Twitter Social Media Climber strategy really works. Big Egos need a lot of worshipping, and you will get some of the wafer crumbs of their Whuffie

9. Be Right-On every zeitgeist - say everything that everyone else wants to hear, no one listens long enough to see the contradictions anyway.

10. Do Something Charitable - people are suckers for a Socially Responsible enterprising nature, a good #mybleedingheart gig will do wonders and no one really looks too closely at where the money raised all goes.

Case Study of the Day

Witness the Ashton Kutcher war effort for a Perfect Storming of Twitter - as TechCrunch notes:

The hugely popular actor started with just a handful of followers when he signed up a few months ago. But soon, he and his famous actress wife, Demi Moore, were adding thousands of followers a day. They would talk about nothing, like everyone else on Twitter, and sometimes they would talk about each other. It’s a true web success story.

See - Rules 1, 4, and 6 covered, and 10,000 mosquito nets is a nice little throwaway for Rule 10. And they did not neglect the PR (Rule 5) and Recommended User List (Rule 3) either. Rule 2 (Run for Prez) will need to be scheduled for 2013 once St. Obama has taken all the flak for The Crunch and been Hoovered up...... besides, if Ronald can do it, so can anyone!

*God knows what defines who is on the recommended list but a quick scan will drive many a conspiracy theory.