Great things about Twellow:

• Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
• Groups related twitterers together

It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development – analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.

The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.

The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.

But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.

Could social networks be the new playground for blackhat marketers?

In the initial stages of Yahoo MyBlogLog’s launch, I know of a number of programmers who automated the creation of new profiles and artificially inflated community sizes and went out to spread spammy marketing messages.

With the current state of Twitter development, what’s to stop marketers from either automating or farming out the creation of a horde of twitter followers, thereby artificially inflating the size of their community.

It’s not secret that a forum with 100,000 registered members with 5-10 active users is pretty much dead. What about a twitter account with 50,000 inactive followers?

I wonder if Twitter will enforce a minimum activity threshold (a number of twitters sent out within a set time interval) like some webmail providers have instituted to continually prune dead and inactive accounts.

Will Twitter be able to present useful stats in the future? Likely, but not in the near future as they’re still coping with growing pains and the resource overhead of third party Twitter API calls, to the extent that pagination (an archive of your twitter conversation) and “replies” (twitter messages that you have received) have been disabled.

–

It could be a while before we see Twitter metrics evolve to comprehensive display the time visitors are spending reading your updates (ie stickiness) and clicking through to your links (conversion?).

Till then “followers” could be a proxy for a twitter popularity contest (traffic quality is a big question mark).

Tread lightly. A conservative approach can do more to preserve your social goodwill, rather than making rash experimental stabs.

Top row: Spot the guy who traded the giant red paperclip for a house?

That’s me in the top row, 2nd from the right.
In Tino’s own words:

There are dozens of social networks that bring the blogosphere together, with Technorati and MyBlogLog being two of the biggest. I wanted to bring a whole bunch of bloggers together on one page. 2000 bloggers to be exact!

Lots of familiar faces among the 300 listed there.

Top row: 4th from the left, Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) holding his $132,997.94 check from Google

Bottom row: 3rd from the left, Kris Jones (Pepperjam), Jim Kukral (Blogkits) is right next to him

Also spotted in the mass of bloggers are:

• Robert Scoble
• Matt Cutts
• ProBlogger Darren Rowse
• Todd Malicoat
• John Chow
• Chris Sandberg
• My buddy and forum specialist Ryan Chua
• Japanese “Cash Quest” babe Kumiko Suzuki

and a host of others.
—

One thing I’ve noticed is that there’re quite a number of blogs hosted at WordPress.com and Blogspot.

If you’re a recreational blogger, I believe it’s ok to host it at a free site.

However, if you see yourself as a serious blogger/SEM/SEO, and you are building a brand and PageRank and backlinks to your blog, would you really want to host it at a free blogging service?

Granted, it’s free.

But if web hosting costs you $100 a year. Don’t you think your branding is worth at least 10 times that?

You could potentially (and I know of cases) of bloggers losing their free domains because of a violation of the terms of service (whether deliberate or inadvertedly), a perceived ‘excessive’ attempt at monetizing their blog, ‘excessive’ traffic coming to their blog.

I’d suggest two steps to “professionalize” your blogging efforts:

• Get a domain name. NameCheap.com is my preferred domain registrar.
• Get low cost, reliable host. I especially like BlueHost.
• Go with a hosted WordPress blog. BlueHost provides a one-click idiot-proof install of WordPress through it’s comprehensive control panel.

It’ll enhance your blog longevity.

For more information on Tino’s project, visit:

–> 2000 Bloggers

As you’re developing your blog and working towards the upper echelons of the bloggerati, consider the following factors which Robert and Maryam Scoble presented at the recent Blog Business Summit.

The logic behind linking to other blogs is that if you’re a genuine content blog, it’s likely the blogger will link back. And you’ll see link love in action as traffic flows back and forth between the two blogs.

It helps to link to credible blogs within your space, and to a blogger you’re regularly reading.

It can be a vicious cycle of kindness if you make it so.

No one’s perfect. Everyone knows that.

Trying to be perfect, coming up with reasons when you’ve obviously made a boo-boo?

Trying to hide? To play it cool? Getting aggro?

Don’t.

It’s like fiddling with a hole in your sweater. Stick your pinkie in, wiggle it around.Soon you’ll have a hole big enough to put your head through.

Fess up to mistakes, laugh about it, and move on.

There’re more things to blog about.

Hands up those who like dry writing? Purely factual blog posts lacking color and personality.

I thought so.

In journalism, 90% of whether your article gets read depends on your headline. Except for retirees and those planning to bone up on their English skills, I hardly know anyone who spends 3 hours reading every article and every word.

The same goes with blogs. In fact you might have even less time to make your pitch.

Most Internet users suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder.

It takes 1-2 minutes to come up with a catchy headline.

It creates immeasurable value in getting your reader to read the post.

The Internet is still primarily a text medium. However that’s changing with podcasting, vodcasting and new technologies coming onstream.

It takes another 5 minutes to:

• Pull a picture from photo archive sxc.hu
• Launch GIMP or Photoshop, edit the photo
• And feature it on your blog.

Your readers will thank you for it too.

Consider too, featuring graphics, ilustrations, sound and video clips, software.

Keep it relevant though.

And most importantly, keep it fun.

Check out the conference synopsis here: Blog Business Summit

Teresa has kindly uploaded a number of the presentations in PDF format, and I’ve learned quite a bit from them.

As a business-oriented blogger, I particularly like the presentations on:

• Community Building Online (by Tara Hunt)
• Branding in the Age of YouTube (Keynote by Ben Edwards)

They both include downloadable presentation slides (PDF format).

Like me, most of this blogs readers might be most interested in:

• Robert & Maryam Scoble’s 10 Ways to a Killer Blog

The presentation slides were very informative and proved some food for thought.

I’ve some thoughts and will be penning them down in a series.

Stay tuned.