On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Pat Rapp <[email protected]> wrote:
> Regarding Twitter, I’ll go ahead and grab another phrase the “Chairman” > (see Eric’s statement below) used recently: coolhunting. > > (Actually I was thinking of BruceS [who still says that frequently], not WilliamG.) > > > I looked it up on Wikipedia and found the term has been around a long time, > but I’d only heard of it recently when Gibson was interviewed about his > latest book and mentioned coolhunting on twitter. > Doug Rushkoff wrote and presented a great Frontline documentary on it some years back: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ It's a little off topic w.r.t. the current discussion, but provides background on how the term was used then, what it origianlly meant (which was something slightly sinister, I would say); you seem to be using it in a more positive way, 'what's cool to *me*', versus the marketers' meaning of 'what will this highly-discretionarily-spending demographic think is cool'. > > > What’s interesting and exciting about these new technology formats is > watching the way people use them. You can easily spot a newb by their tweets > describing their lunch or their trivial (let’s face it – boring) statements > about the minutiae of their lives. When it gets interesting and useful is > when people start using twitter for coolhunting – quickly scanning tweets > for cool and emerging technology and science information. > > That's an interesting point, because I just read a paper that in some sense relies on the large body of those "newb" tweets for its conclusions -- it found a very strong correlation between mood states reflected by aggregations of twitter posts and rises and falls in the Dow Jones. >From Technology Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25900/?p1=Blogs Link to PDF: http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003 The methodology explicitly excludes any tweet with a URL in it, so it largely excludes sophisticated twitter users. Would be interesting to see if it still works with a current sample. Also, I wonder to what extent those folks are 'newbs' and to what extent they're just not functioning at your level of expertise. > > > In a nutshell: > > I use Digsby ... > Digsby, huh... gotta check that out...I still find Twitter pretty uncomfortable... > ... to allow twitter to provide tiny little pop-ups on the bottom of my > screen. I follow about 100-150 people whose tweets are valid in my > work/hobbies/etc. The tweets give just enough info on the topic for me to > decide if it’s worth my time to click on the link in the tweet. I get way > more info this way than I ever did reading online magazines or even through > RSS feeds. And things spread quickly. (Example: I’d heard that Mandelbrot > died at least a full day before CNN posted it.) Also, everyone has varied > interests. When you start following people whose work fascinates you, you > start connecting dots all over the place and seeing opportunities to take > two diverse ideas and merge them together. > Yeh. Yeah. Ahem. Like, all day long on a Saturday and half the day Sunday, with nothing solid to show at the end of that time. ("When I should have been writing.") > > > Twitter is one of those things that is super-easy to use, but kind of > baffling when you first dive in. Until you find the niche of users you’re > interested in following, the hunt for cool stuff is somewhat elusive. Once > you get going, though, it’s an invaluable tool. > Figuring out how to do this stuff effectively is the hard part for me. I have largely given up on RSS aggregating because I just couldn't budget my time with it -- I'd lose whole weekends trying to catch up and never even get close. Twitter I've sort of kept at arm's length because I'm afraid it would go the same way. I'm not good at shutting stuff out -- if something looks a little interesting to me, I tend to look at it to see if there's more there, I get very uncomfortable with the idea that I might be missing something. That said, for work I'm going to be jumping in with all four left feet, so to speak: We're going to get a subscription to the Alterian SM2 service, which is well-suited for stuff like coolhunting. Expensive, though; we'll only be able to support it because of some big contracts we're getting. -- -- eric scoles | [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
