Here’s an idea: spam your friends.

Companies are increasingly recruiting regular people to become advocates for their products & services– without requiring those people to disclose their commercial connection to these companies.

The concept is simple: you sign up for one of these services, and grant advertisers permission to send out tweets or posts on [...]]]>

Here’s an idea: spam your friends.

Companies are increasingly recruiting regular people to become advocates for their products & services– without requiring those people to disclose their commercial connection to these companies.

The concept is simple: you sign up for one of these services, and grant advertisers permission to send out tweets or posts on your behalf. Each time someone clicks on the link in your post, you are paid a fee by the service.

And you thought application spam was bad. As The New York Times‘ Brad Stone puts it–

…the bigger opportunity may be in matching advertisers with so-called influencers — the more popular users of services like Twitter. A number of start-ups, like Ad.ly, Izea and Peer2, a division of Creative Asylum, a Hollywood ad agency, are pursuing the opportunity to put persuasive messages into regular dialogue on social networks.

“We don’t want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network,” said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. “All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us.”

Got that? We don’t want an army of spammers. We just want everyone you know to market our stuff.

via Ping – Hiring Tweeters and Bloggers to Send Ads – NYTimes.com.

A lovely little manifesto on the dangers of living an accelerated existence:

Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, [...]]]>

A lovely little manifesto on the dangers of living an accelerated existence:

Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

I admit: I routinely find myself scrambling to reply to unread email that requires no response. The success of alternative communication engines such as instant messaging, social networks, and the ubiquitous Twitter testify to the now-universal realization that email, that venerable old man of the electronic age, has utterly failed to improve our lives.

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.

via A Manifesto for Slow Communication – WSJ.com.

Robert Scoble asks “How can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” The answer: not very easily. Although Scoble provides some tools to help you manage the press of tweets, the real nugget here lies in his distinction between Follow and follow:

There [...]]]>

Robert Scoble asks “How can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” The answer: not very easily. Although Scoble provides some tools to help you manage the press of tweets, the real nugget here lies in his distinction between Follow and follow:

There is a difference between Following (with a capital “F”) and following, the way Chris and I are doing it.

Over on FriendFeed I was using groups to follow a small number of people very intimately. My wife, for instance, and my son, were Followed (capital F) very closely in a group. I saw 100% of what they write. Another group, of tech thought leaders was followed pretty closely. I probably saw 80% of what flowed through that group. But the other groups of 25,000 people? I randomly saw what they were writing. I saw maybe 10%. So, if you wrote 10 Tweets I might see one of those.

The moral of the story?

Who you follow defines you.

How can ANYONE follow 10,000 or more?.