A few of us have been saying this for some time, so it’s good to see that Meeyoung Cha’s research backs us up! From Scott Berinato on Harvard Business Review: Cha called her paper, “The Million Follower Fallacy,” a term that comes from work by Adi Avnit. Avnit posited that the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless,… Read more →
Derek Sivers reminds us that on the other end of our keyboard there lies a real person, someone who has real feelings, who will have real reactions to what we say. When we yell at our car or coffee machine, it’s fine because they’re just mechanical appliances. So when we yell at a website or company, using our computer or… Read more →
When it comes to sharing links, I will confess that I tend to do so on Twitter these days, rather than Delicious. But Packrati.us now lets me do both at once. By hooking up my Twitter account to my Delicious account, I can now send a link to Twitter and have it automatically saved to Delicious. Settings let me control… Read more →
Brendan Koerner writes over at Wired about How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive. He says: Last year, Nucleus Research warned that Facebook shaves 1.5 percent off total office productivity; a Morse survey estimated that on-the-job social networking costs British companies $2.2 billion a year. But for knowledge workers charged with transforming ideas into products — whether gadgets, code,… Read more →
Last Friday I wrote a blog post on my own blog about The Impenetrable Layer of Suck and did what I usually do with blog posts these days: I Tweeted it. I saw a few people reTweet it, so thought I’d check my stats. This is what I saw: I’ve heard many a time from friends at Guardian Technology, who… Read more →
Clive Thompson writes on his blog (and in Wired) about how social networks such as Twitter become dysfunctional when the network gets too big and, as a result, too lopsided: When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down. This is a point I’ve been making for… Read more →
There’s a lot of stuff written about Twitter and most of it rubbish, but every now and again I read something that really sums Twitter up nicely. This piece by David Carr in the New York Times is one of those great articles that talks very clearly about why Twitter is both useful and important, but without flipping out in… Read more →
Twitter is beta testing some functionality specifically for business users: the byline. If you’re running a business account you might want more than one person to be able to use it, but it can cause confusion to have more than one person Tweeting under a single identity. CoTweet handles this by allowing multiple people to access a single account, with… Read more →
Google has announced that it is going to be indexing the web in real time: Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. [...] You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from… Read more →
What is it that makes our inbox such an enticing place that we spend hours there every day? It’s a question that fascinates me, mainly because I have such an uncomfortable relationship with email. I get lots of it, am often slow to respond and frequently end up feeling guilty because my email has got the best of me. Psychologist… Read more →
Suw is one of the UK’s social media pioneers. With over a decade of social media experience, Suw has helped clients worldwide use social tools for collaboration and communication internally and to build customer relationships externally. She has a comprehensive understanding of strategy, implementation and social functionality design (building social interaction into the heart of a website or application).
She writes regularly for Forbes.com on publishing, self-publishing, crowdfunding and alternative business models for authors.
Suw is herself a self-published author. Her first novella, Argleton, was described as "an absorbing and satisfying story" and comes "highly recommended, especially if you like maps or are a computer geek". She is currently finishing up her second novella which will be out early summer 2013.
Chocolate and Vodka is her personal blog where she writes about writing and any $random_subjects that catch her eye. And yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson is the editor of the Media Development Investment Fund's Knowledge Bridge site and newsletter. The Media Development Loan Fund invests in independent news organisations in emerging democracies, and the Knowledge Bridge project is designed to help these news organisations make the digital transition.
Kevin brings almost 20 years of journalism experience to his work. Since 1996, he has been focused on digital journalism, working for a wide range of news organisations. He brings a depth of experience in reporting, editing and digital development to his work. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
From 2006 to 2010, he worked at The Guardian as its first blogs editor and then as its digital research editor. As digital research editor, he was responsible for monitoring key developments in digital media and evaluating their value to Guardian journalists and our audiences. From 2010 until he joined MDLF in 2012, he worked as a freelance journalist and with Suw as a digital media consultant and digital journalism training working with news organisations including Al Jazeera, Reed Business Information, Czech TV and CNN.
