By now most of us know what Twitter is. Of do we? I spent more than a few months with a Twitter account and no real idea how to use it. At first it seemed a lot like re-branded Instant Messaging and I already have plenty of choices for that. Did I really need another one? My business partner Nick kept telling me, “Dude, you need to get on this. It’s big.” I wasn’t initially moved.

And then came the revelation: Twitter is not about instant messging. It is about promoting yourself to others. You can do it for business reasons or for personal ones, but one simple fact is true: Sell yourself 140 characters at a time. I’m not talking about spamming people. We’ve got plenty of that via other avenues (and Twitter is a victim, too). It’s about saying things that are quick, concise, relevant and interesting about what is happening in your world. If you say things that are not boring, people will follow you. You don’t have to find followers, they will find you. All you need to do is tweet. Dare I say it? “Tweet, and they will come.”

To date I have three Twitter accounts, each for a different facet of me. Admittedly I use one more than the others but I don’t like to cross-brand who I am. But that works for me. I tweet about business things with my business Twitter account. I tweet about more personal things with my personal twitter accounts. I don’t like to muddy the waters (which is the primary reason I despise Facebook). That may not work for you. Do what feels right.

The single biggest thing you can do for yourself on Twitter is to make sure you don’t get lured into using it as another IM client. I follow more than a few people who use it to chat about where to go to lunch or what time a movie starts, etc. That’s annoying. To them I suggest a little app called Skype. If you use Twitter as an IM client you are likely to lose followers in a hurry.

Twitter is a phenomon. It’s still misunderstood by many, though. More famous twitterer’s like Ashton Kutcher have increased their celebrity by making them more accessible to their fans. Having a direct line like that to people who have historically been so unattainable is a powerful, powerful thing. While you may not be hooking up with Demi you still may have interesting things to say. Tweet them. You will develop a following of your own.

A final note: Just because someone follows you does not mean you have to follow them in return. If you get a new follower, look them up. See what they tweet about. Read their bio. Are they interesting to you? If so, follow back. If not, that’s cool, too. If you do follow someone, see who else is following them. You will find that many of their followers are interesting to you. Follow them. Some of them will follow you in return. It’s viral.

Now go. Tweet.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I read a lot.  A LOT.  Technology articles on the Interweb are limitless.  Some rock the house and take me to a new level.  Others …not so much.  When being taught something in an article or in a book I love to see pictures.  I’m a visual learner so a well-structured diagram can make all the difference.  But here’s my problem; how many times have you seen a diagram like this:

What do I see?  I see something going from a PC to a server through some network whose details are otherwise unknown (e.g. cloud).  How is this diagram helpful?  What does it add to the story?  Wait, so you’re saying data is going from one computer to another computer?  Ohhhh!  I get it!  Praise Jesus for the diagram.  I wouldn’t have got that little nugget otherwise.  The time you spent creating the diagram was time well spent.  Time well spent indeed.

We can make the diagram much more technical, of course.  Check out this little gem:

A-Ha!!!  A computer is sending some data to another computer and there is a router in-between them?  Boom goes the dynamite!!!  Revalation had.  Mission accomplished.

The moral of this little story:  Diagrams are cool but if they really don’t add anything to the topic please don’t bother.  Let’s keep it useful, people.

I love Twitter.  I’m addicted to it.  I tweet from my laptop all day at work.  I tweet from my desktop PC when I get home at night.  I tweet from my iPhone while I’m at traffic lights, standing in line in the grocery store and waiting in the doctor’s office.  I tweet when I’m in the bathroom and when I’m watching Battlestar Galactica.  So, yeah, I love to tweet.    And that’s saying a lot.  I usually don’t get into any of this social networking stuff.  MySpace is an abomination and Facebook is becoming more and like MySpace every day.  LinkedIn seems to be holding its own as a gathering of professionals but I fear for its long-term viability (fear may not be the right word).

But I’m getting a little irked with the direction I see Twitter going.  A micro-blogging mechanism for friends and people with common interests to send a maximum of 140 characters is what Twitter is all about.  But now, more and more people are starting to follow me that have no interest in me other than getting me to follow them in return.  It’s the expected courtesy; you follow me so I follow you.  It would be rude for me not to reciprocate, right?  But they don’t follow me because they like what I have to say.  They follow me because if they can con me into following them in return they can then begin to spam me with their veiled  (or not so veiled) advertisements.  In the past 24 hours I’ve had several people start to follow me that don’t know me and don’t have any interest in what I tweet about.  The most recent is a guy trying to peddle skateboards and skateboarding gear.  Uh, what was it I said in one of my tweets that made you think that I was interested in your wares?  Poser.

It’s too bad, really.  There is no place to hide from spammers.  There is a fine line between getting people to know what you do and just being a pest.

So today I am coining a new term:  spitter;  a twitter spammer.  I think I’m the first to use it.

About a year and a half ago I was working on writing a book that forced me to learn that about 16-17% of the Earth’s population had Internet access.  This is a stunningly low percentage of people.  I laugh at myself whenever I get grumpy for not having connectivity every single place I go.  My sense of entitlement to net access is pretty …American?  Regardless, I expect it.  I have to force myself to feel privileged for being in the incredibly small percentage that does have connectivity pretty much everywhere (thank you, mobile phone).

This morning I decided to see how the planet was coming along.  Wow.  What a bump.  According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm a little under 22% of the population is now connected.  That shakes out to about 1.46 billion people.  The number of connected people seems to be growing at about 4% per year.  That’s impressive by itself but even more impressive when you consider the fact that the earth’s population is increasing at an insane rate at the same time.

IPv6 was designed with the year 2050 in mind; a time when we expect there to be somewhere around 10 billion people puttering around.  Even with 100% penetration (e.g. everybody on Earth has Internet connectivity) there are still more than enough IP addresses to go around.  And around.  And around.  In fact, with a population of 10 billion thera are 2 billion /48 networks per person.  Each /48 network has 65,536 possible subnets.  Each subnet has 18.4 quintillion possible addresses.  So that’s (2,000,000,000*65,536)*18.4 quintillion addresses per person.  We should be good.

Anyone who has been around more than a few months in the field of IT knows that things change.  Fast.  You are hard-pressed to get comfortable with something before it has been replaced, revamped or revisited.  It’s the nature of the business.  Technology evolves.  The developers of IT solutions are some of the very best artists.  They create technological artwork that is both beautiful and fascinating.  If it were a food we’d say it tastes great, too!  IT developers are also the worst artists.  An artist knows when a work is complete.  They can walk away with the knowledge that they have created something wonderful.  IT is full of the artists who can’t walk away, who can’t say, “I’m done.”  They think they’re finished and then one night they have an idea on how to make something a little bit better.  The process never ends.  Their art inspires others whose own artwork begins the process anew.  It’s a powerful cycle.  It is the engine of technology.  The engine, however, is on a downward slope.  Not in a bad way, though.  The downward slope I’m referring to is one that allows for the gain of tremendous momentum.
As the years go by I continue to be humbled by the pace of change.  Humbled and bothered.  Bothered and overwhelmed.  Overwhelmed and frustrated.  Frustrated and invigorated.  It’s not just the users (in the traditional sense of the word) that have to absorb all of this perpetual tinkering.  It’s the network engineers, administrators and other IT professionals, too.  Eight years ago we struggled to keep up with all of the new security exploits.  Today, we fight more to keep up with the technology.
Will there ever come a time that the technology I just finished deploying isn’t on its way to obsolescence?  In a word, “no”.  How then, do I stay relevant when I can barely hang with the pace of change?  Sadly, I don’t know for sure.  There are some things, however, that I do know.  I know you have to fight for it.  I know you can’t sit on your past accomplishments.  I know you have to love this and I know you have to constantly learn.  At some point I think we’ll all get tired.  When that time comes I think you have to let go.  Let go into retirement or into another line of work.  I have images of the little boy in the barn full of manure digging with gusto and zeal into the pile of dung.  He is so optimistic that there is a pony in there somewhere.  When the day comes that you walk into the barn and see nothing put a pile of shit and another new model of pitch fork with which to shovel it you know your relevance is gone.  It’s time to go.
Me?  I’m still looking for that pony!  But there’s a weird smell in the room…

Colin Weaver

I could measure the success of my business by the number of customers I have.  I could also measure it by the amount of money the company earns.  But what about the subtle indicators of success?  What are the tell-tale signs that things are going well?  One of them is Splenda.

When ITdojo first opened its doors almost six years ago I went to Farm Fresh and bought a little box of Splenda.  That box (the home size) lasted about a year.  The following year I bought a box of Splenda from Sam’s club.  Yeah, the big restaurant size.  It lasted a few years.

Today, ITdojo is plowing through Splenda.  We’re using up a few of the big Sam’s Club boxes each year.

I wonder how much longer before we’re using a box every month…