Today 18 students are blogging in class--or, more accurately, 12 are setting up their blogs. Several are at a social media conference, others are already sophisticated bloggers. Several are brand new. Their assignment? Blog three times a week. Get people to follow your blog. Blog on meaningful ideas, links, interviews. Use your blog to get an internship or a job. Cut through the information glut.
How will they do it? Stay tuned.
As we are working on our blogs today, we are listening to Terry Gross's interview with Biz Stone about Twitter. He is a co-founder.
//www.npr.org/2011/02/16/133775340/twitters-biz-stone-on-starting-a-revolution
What about censorship, as we just witnessed in Egypt the last few weeks and Iran this week?
"The key thing," he says, "is it's important to allow everyone access," when Terry asks him about countries trying to censor access to the Internet.
An "electric day" was the day Twitter kept the service up when the State Department contacted them and requested they not take down the service. One of the many legal, ethical and moral dilemmas have faced.
The creators of Twitter have been supporting freedom of speech for a decade, Stone says. "Twitter has made it so much more intense." He said Twitter's been part of many uprisings around the world.
Media around the world call him and ask him "Mr. Stone, what was your role in the _____________ uprising?"
Hillary Clinton has made a major speech on Internet freedoms. www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm
Stone says he supports most everything articulated by Clinton.
Stone debunks any talks about being purchased by Facebook and Google. "Twitter is not for sale," he said in the February 15 interview. "We are not for sale and we haven't been....No one's made an offer to me."
Gross told Stone Twitter has been valued at $10 billion. Stone said actually not--"That's just what they're writing in the newspapers," he said. "That's just a completely made up evaluation."
One of the most interesting parts of the interview was about Twitter's business model. "Where do profits come in?" asked Gross. "How is it profitable? Where is the advertising?"
The "value before profit" model described by Stone said businesses found profits right off the bat. "Promoted profits, trends and accounts," are the way Stone says Twitter makes money.
A word or phrase is purchased by a company. It's labeled as a "promoted" trend.
During the Super Bowl Audi promoted their new car and at the end included a hashtag "Progress Is." They also bought that as a promoted trend and as a promoted tweet. "They were able to turn an ad into an online conversation about what progress is" and translate that meme into an ad for them that is continuing to this day.
"We hope to drastically grow those revenues," Stone says about the "promoted" trends and tweets. These are clearly marked, according to Stone.
The "resonance algorithm," a mathematical calculation of how tweets are resonating, are constantly being measured by Twitter. Twitter drops the low ones.
Twitter got off to a slow start, initially.
When did Stone know that Twitter had come of age after being a laughingstock?
When the newly elected President Obama "tweeted" that he had just won the election in November 2008.
