I bought green shirts and I am wearing them.  I have turned my twitter icon temporarily green.  I keep getting up from the middle of other tasks and checking on events in Iran, even though I am usually far more disciplined.  But I thought I should write down some reasons since my family asked, and since it’s useful rumination.

1. The futurist in me is totally fascinated by the role social media and worldwide transparency are playing.
2. The writer is fascinated by the stories and raw emotion.  Everyone is emotional.  I cried when I saw Neda’s death. How pointless.
3. The American in me does not believe religion and government should be all mixed up together.  Both are better and stronger if separated.
4. Watching the unrest in Iran is being part of something, perhaps something big, that is happening in the world.
5. There is a bit of adrenaline in this.  Just being honest.
6. I am hopeful for positive change.  Ahmadinejad with nukes is scary.  I would like Iran to be a country I am not afraid of.
7. (And I think this is the biggest one for most Americans) - I believe in freedom, and I believe that freedom needs honest elections.  If - at the core - that is what the Iranians are fighting for, it is worth it to me.
8. I have found Iran interesting since I read two books.  One was “Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi” and the other was “The Ends of the Earth:  From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, by Robert D. Kaplan“

Some things I am not “For”

1. Formal government action by the US.  This is not ours to solve.  It would probably backfire.  Read some of the posts at the Tehran Bureau if you don’t agree - they are in first person and more eloquent than I could be on this subject.  We can help and we can cheer, we can retweet and write, but there is no other useful role for us.
2. I am not particularly “for” Mousavi.  Nor against him.  My vote is irrelevant on this issue, as it should be.

I hope my support is useful to even a few Iranians, or that it helps keep the attention here on the events there.  This is worth watching and helping where we can, as individuals.

What do you think?

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I have been thinking about transparency, social media, and government accountability for a while.  At the FiRe conference in San Diego, I ran into fellow sf writer and contrarian, David Brin, who authored  the non-fiction book, The Transparent Society.  This book made a difference in the way I think about government and life, and has made me a firm believer in the idea that transparency begets accountability. 

As a futurist, I knew a long time ago that the Internet would be the doorway to the future.  I just didn’t know how that doorway would open.  Ten years ago I felt the insemination of Twitter and YouTube and FaceBook, but I could not have told you what they’d look like.  I might have guessed a few of the features of FaceBook, but Twitter has been a true wildcard.  Instead of simply providing hyperlinks between the static bits of information, the overlapping concentric circles of followers that tweet and re-tweet are linking human hearts and minds across the globe.  

That’s a powerful thing.

The current obvious example is the unrest in Iran.   Anyone in the world with an interest has been able to easily discover events that would have been fairly easily kept far more secret ten or twenty years ago, and in realtime.   Video is linked to as soon as it is posted, and retweets its way around the globe in what looks like minutes.  The tweets coming from and about Iran (primarily #iranelection, but many more) are helping to force accountability on the regime in Iran.  It’s too early to tell how this story will play out, but it is clear that social media has been a player.

Before we leave the subject of Iran, right after the protests started in Iran, many twitterers put pressure on CNN to provide coverage (see #CNNfail).  That’s the pressure of the popular stream on a third estate company. 

Some of our largest retailers have had the transparent breadcrumbs of Twitter work against them as well.    Or Take the #amazonfail slapping-about that happened within hours of people discovering that sales rankings on GLBT books were being dropped.  Amazon is being fussed at on social media networks as I write this because it appears that  a book from Amazon can only be re-downloaded a set (and smallish) number of times.  But we have to re-download every time we see it on a different device or even update our kindle technology.  My guess?  That will change.  Amazon will have to answer for the consequences whether intended or not, and it will choose a more consumer-friendly business practice.

I just gave a talk in Memphis Tenessee.  The topic got away from me a little - shifting from the future to social networking.  Everyone (me included) appears to be fascinated by that topic.  After the talk, a photographer came up to me and said that social networks have built his business, and that he hoped the people would take what I had said to heart.   I have sold stories on Twitter, to be distributed by Twitter, and even for print magazines because I was toe–deep in the stream of Twitter at the right moment. 

I’ve been trying to figure out a better government model for our times (I’m an sf writer - my mind does weird things).  I think giving all of the people a way to talk immediately to anyone else who wants to listen may be a lynchpin setting tool for stories as I work this out in my head.

Twitter does not appear to have a traditional business model.  But maybe a primary value of social networks is in the peace, properity, and accountability they bring to the world.  Maybe its in the trail of transparent breadcrumbs we drop for each other across cyberspace in 140 character bursts.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I was helping a friend out with some Twitter questions via email and thought my response to her might actually be useful to others.  So here it is:

First, for 140 characters a shot, Twitter is a big topic.  So I’ll stick to the basics: followers, following, dangers, protocol, and a tool.  

Followers:

You will accrue followers.  The more you use twitter, the more you will accrue.  Twitter is very searchable, and so people may be searching for a word like “acquisition.”  If you tweet about acquisition, and someone is searching in that term, they may choose to follow you.  That’s the primary way I know of that strangers find you, but there are third party programs that will recommend matches for people I think.  I don’t use them.  But there are now hundreds of twitter applications.

Friends, business acquaintances, and neighbors will find you.  It really doesn’t matter.  You will have a little more “cred” on Twitter if you have a decent number of followers.  You don’t need thousands – but a few hundred is a good thing. Generally, more followers doesn’t hurt you, and who follows you doesn’t matter – that is, you want certain followers, but if you get extras, that’s probably fine.  If you get ones you don’t trust or like (say someone starts to @reply you with offers to sell you Viagra or someone you think of as not quite a friend follows you) then you can block them.  Every once in a while I’ll go browse some of the followers I don’t know, and I’ve been pleased and surprised at the people who chose to follow me.

There are people who seem to want to have thousands of followers and follow thousands.  I personally think that diminishes the Twitter’s usefulness, but it seems to be an important meme out there right now.

Following:

Often people will give you their twitter user names on business cards and the like now.  You can also search twitter by term and follow people you are interested in.  At this point, at least half of the known universe appears to be twittering. I try to only follow people whose tweets interest me or who I think may interest me – meaning if I get a bunch of tweets on topics I’m not interested in, I stop following that person.  You will be able to see the tweets of everyone you follow, and you don’t need to clutter you twitter screen with thousands of people’s tweets. 

Dangers:

Spam has hit twitter.  Often tweets are a few phrases with a shortened url.  Be careful – if you don’t know and trust the course of the tweet, I recommend not clicking on that url.  Pretend it’s like email.  There’s viruses and nastiness out there in twitterland.  If you are smart and careful they will not bother you.

Protocol:

Use twitter as a conversation tool.  Do as many @replies and direct replies as you can – I try to do two responses to every tweet I send – otherwise the app becomes a bunch of people splatting up data that no one responds to.  Don’t do very much direct marketing.  For example, I made a list of top 100 authors who twitter on mashable (which is very cool!), and partly that was because the selector culled all of the marketing-only writers.  A little is fine - everyone expects that –but be yourself and be a person.

Applications:

There are a lot of twitter applications.  My favorite is Tweetdeck.  I can have my twitter stream, my @replies, and a few searches running at once and visible.  It does have an annoying audible beep it comes with which you want to immediately turn off.  On the iphone, I like Twitterific.  But there are a lot of people who swear by a lot of applications, and so you might ask other people what they like.

Anyone else have favorite apps for favorite advice I missed the chance to pass on to my friend? 

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

One:  Twitter is actually a lot of fun.  I suspect this is part of its popularity.  Things to enjoy include putting a whole page worth of data into 140 characters (Haiku for modern times), hearing engaging snips about your friends’ days (and yes, what they had for breakfast is generally noise.  But there are clever fun updates like sold a story, got a ticket and the cop was cute, walking on the beach in Hawaii, found a new way to use Twitter….).   There’s also art out there:  Fiction flashforwards at Outshine.  For those who think tweets are not haiku enough, there’s always Twitter Haiku.

Two:  Twitter is making changes in the world bigger than 140 characters.  I was at a meeting of local CIO’s and the presenters mentioned that Twitter was driving their social media efforts, including the blending of departments.  Twitter is becoming a choice application for emergency management departments in governments.  I heard a story (unverified) that a JetBlue customer sent a Twitter complaint and a stewardess was by his side in moments helping him out.  I did find an interesting article on corporate Twitter accounts that included JetBlue.  And then there was that revolution in Moldavia.

Three:  Business models are being built on Twitter.  Just look at the list of Twitter applications.   Tweet Stats says I tweet 2.7 times per day.  That’s not very much, but in spite of that, Twitter Grader gives me a 93 out of a hundred, and ranks me at 132,139 out of 2, 120, 676, apparently based on some analysis of who I follow and who follows me.  And that list is really just end user applications.  I hear rumors of many corporate apps.

Four:  Twitter cannot die.  I mean, of course it can.  I’m a futurist, after all.  Just like we bought into the Internet gold rush ten years ago (what fun!  VC for everyone, and private jets for all geeks), and the housing bubble (it can’t go down, buy and flip, buy and flip!), we’re in what may be a Twitter bubble.  There is no business model.  We are all having great fun and many people are making peripheral money from Twitter, but the company itself hasn’t figured it out yet.  Twitter has been a surprise success from day one, and so a rabbit may appear from Twitter’s hat, but short of that it’s going to have to go to Google or Microsoft or some other corporate data manager.  Maybe Amazon?  At that point, it may lose its cool new start-up cache.  Still, that might be better than a popped Twitter bubble.  An awful lot rides on those 140 character Tweets these days.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.