Jeremiah Owyang and a proper thank-you...

Yesterday, I complimented Jeremiah Owyang on his blog post by providing my own post here and also publicly on Twitter, he responded with a "Thank-you."

We're all busy and still, I believe that's no excuse for poor manners. Jeremiah demonstrated that even though he has thousands of followers collectively in "his" community on Twitter and elsewhere online, he is still able to take the time to thank someone specifically for something they've said or done.

Like my wife and I say to our daughter, "manners never go on a holiday."

Of course, we all get to choose who, how and if we want to respond to someone online or offline. That said, I believe that just like a general lack of ability to effectively and properly follow-up in a business context when opportunity knocks, there also seems to be a general lack of "manners," on the Internet today as well.

Call me "old-fashioned" if you like but I believe it proper to "thank" people when they take the time to respond to anything I've done, regardless of the intent or comment being good or bad. This is especially tough when someone is saying something less than positive about you, your company or the work you're doing. This is the true test of the Internet today. We continue to see large companies running and hiding because they don't want to stand up to the scrutiny.

Welcome to a general test of our morals, philosophy and character, how we respond or don't respond says something about us as human beings. To me this is at the core of who I am, it guides me and my business dealings every single day and I don't ever waver from it.

So to everyone who cares to make contact with me or my company, know that I will always "thank-you" for your time and comment regardless of its content, as long as, you're being respectable. I respect your opinion, I may not always agree with it and I understand that you are entitled to it. The fact that you took some of your valuable time on this planet to communicate with me in general says something positive about me and/or my company.

Thank-you for reading this post and I hope you have a profitable day.

Is Guy Kawasaki/Alltop about "meaning" or "money?"

Back in February, Jeremiah Owyang updated (he called it an analysis, and as you'll read in his post, even Forrester Research analysts make mistakes like the rest of us) he had previously written about Guy Kawasaki's new (in his words - "gimmick" site) Alltop.com. The overall reviews from Owyang's twitter followers (follow me here) of Guy's site were mixed at best. Alltop.com was criticized for being a non-innovative "clone" of existing sites like popurls, originalsignal.com. Many did compliment Guy (including Owyang) on his ability to market the site (the Influence model). Citing for example his leveraging of existing "A-listers" in his ego topic section for example to garner attention for Alltop. Further, that "Techcrunch took the bait." Many concluded the attention was really more for Guy, than Alltop.

However, some time has passed now and we all recognize Guy's motivation here is to like most other sites make money. I know that many of you have seen Guy talk ( in person or on video) about his preference for sites or businesses that are about "making meaning "as their core purpose as being the ones that win over those who just want to grow and be acquired from the outset.

So my question to the readers of this post is. If you could only pick one answer: Do you think Alltop.com is about "making meaning" or "making money?"

A second question may be: Has Guy won you over with Alltop yet? It seems that if you search those who have made one of his various lists, that seems to be a proud moment for most... How about you "B-listers" out there...does making an Alltop topic list make a difference? Enquiring minds at fusedlogic want to know...

Human nature at work on Twitter and Plurk

So as you can see to the right of this post I've added something called the "Plurk Timeline," this is in addition to my twitter account and Identi.ca account, I'm fusedlogic there too.

Anyway, this is part of my research on micro-blogging and how people use it. For example, Guy Kawasaki, provides regular updates regarding his site Alltop.com, the new topics he's added and requests for feeds to add from the twitter community. Such as his most recent question.

"I want to build the equivalent of twitterati.alltop.com for Friend
Feed. Does anyone have a good starting list?"

Others such as lead strategist Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research uses Twitter to keep people thinking about the social web in general. He directs people to new "lists" on his blog, new trends he sees happening, events he's attending and articles where he's quoted, typically in the San Francisco Gate...

Many others use twitter as a way to engage in conversations related to their business interests, some still just let us all know about their favorite foods and the activities they're doing at that very moment in time...

Out of all of these various content entries, I most enjoy those that drive the conversation to innovate. Guy Kawasaki is looking for a list for his new topic on twitterati.alltop.com because of a suggestion made on twitter by Christine Lu, someone who has collaborated with Guy on China.alltop.com

Frankly, the twitter community in many ways is building Alltop.com, as Guy listens engages and asks questions...the "twitter crowd" is responding through ideas, traffic and objections from time to time...now Guy doesn't take every piece of advice or suggestion, that's not feasible and he's stated in an interview with Christine Lu that all he's looking to do is make $750K a year from Alltop.com and keep things simple...

That's obviously a great plan and there's no doubt that he'll easily achieve that.

In future posts I'll talk about how the "twitterati," or in other words (in many cases, not all but many...) the "unapproachable snobby elite," think very highly of themselves.

You can always tell who they are because when on twitter if you direct a comment or question to them they selectively decide whether you as a little twitter nobody deserve a direct response... This is an interesting experiment in watching human nature...sure we're all busy but some of us respect human beings and others....not so much.

As my Canadian social media strategy company fusedlogic continues its modest growth globally...I will always continue to approach business like "The Great One, Wayne Gretzky" treats others, fans, players etc... No matter how successful you are...one always needs to respect other human beings regardless of their status in life.

Twitter Raises $15 Million in VC Cash

The timing couldn't be better to raise this round of VC financing as Twitter needs tweaking. You can find out more about the cash specifics here at Gigaom.

There is currently a cascading effect happening on this site. The uptime isn't of late, so...."up" as it is "down". This means that people who require the need to update the world on the bagel type they're having at this very moment (I use twitter but not for bagel updates), are quickly looking for other solutions to their need for micro-blogging.

So what is that solution, well Jeremiah Owyang (and a few others) has been mentioning the fact that there is a bit of an exodus to a new social media aggregation service called Friendfeed.com. This is a site where you can keep up to date on almost all of your social networking habits (er channels) and that of your friends and colleagues. What this means for twitter, a company that despite the new cash is scrambling to save itself from the lack of apparent scalability capability is that they are in serious damage control mode...this may all be the fact that they're a victim of their own success and the technology is breaking down. This also means that the "pre-money" valuation of $80 million for twitter may not stay there for long if they continue to lose twitter enthusiasts in the droves they currently are...Everytime someone like Jeremiah says Friendfeed another group takes off. This is an "early-adopter" technology to say the least and the early-adopter crowd is fickle (like everyone else online I guess), keep em happy and perform or they're "outta here" and in many cases gone for good...

Oh the pressures of a near $100 million dollar tech company eh???