Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips - Forbes.com
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/31/top-twitter-tips-entrepreneurs-technology-twitter.html

TIPs

Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers.

An excellent article that @brendanhughes could have written.

great business article on Twitter from Forbes.

theKbuzz

"What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution."

Does crowdsourcing exist as it is popularly conceived? Yes, it does, but it doesn't have anything to do with innovation. Jigsaw, the community-created database of 16 million business contacts, is crowdsourcing. Tens of thousands of people have added business contacts to Jigsaw's database so they can earn points and get access to business contacts entered by others. Jigsaw sells this data to companies, generating millions in revenue. Jigsaw is the only true crowdsourced business I know of. The other businesses mentioned in the crowdsourcing category, Innocentive, Threadless, Spreadshirt, iStockPhoto, are really versions of Wikipedia, that is, aggregations of the inventions of individual virtuosos. Other large projects, like Linux, Apache ( APA - news - people ) and GIMP, are virtuoso creations around which consortiums of experts have gathered.

What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution.

great article that most crowdsourcing is about broadcasting to people with training. however, this is challenged by pitting 100 semitrained folk against individual virtuosos. the 100 semitrained folk win.

"... in the popular press, and in the minds of millions of people, the word crowdsourcing has created an illusion that there is a crowd that solves problems better than individuals. ... There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing. What really happens in crowdsourcing ... is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution." Author: Dan Woods, Forbes.com, Sept. 29, 2009.

...communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world....As ever more people get connected, we see an acceleration in the way the Internet is used to coordinate action and render services from human input. We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system.

"the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world."

Another outcome of the social nervous system is that we see the shift away from privacy as an inalienable right to an individual responsibility. In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life. Older generations expect that digital natives will one day wish to erase all their indiscreet photos online. But I don't believe this nonstop exposure will go away as the digital natives mature. Our lives are increasingly being logged on the Internet. It is part of the trade. Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.

Older generations expect that digital natives will one day wish to erase all their indiscreet photos online. But I don't believe this nonstop exposure will go away as the digital natives mature. Our lives are increasingly being logged on the Internet. It is part of the trade. Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.