I am a patient man.   I have even been occasionally marketed as, “reasonable”, although reports vary in the accuracy of such a bold statement.    I do have limits, however, as folks close to me may suggest, and I’ve identified the Top 10 Twitter Sins that should you commit them you may find me a follower no longer.

It’s nothing personal, trust; it’s simply a matter of management — I can’t possibly follow you on Twitter if you make it hard or painful for me to do so.    So here I give you:

The Top Ten Twitter Sins:

(no particular order)

1.   Over-self-promotion – Unless you are a clearly-identified business, over-promotion of yourself on Twitter is like masturbating in public.   It makes everyone uncomfortable and you’re the only one who feels good about it.    A mention here or there or touting your new blog post once or twice is fine; more than that and you need Kleenex for the cleanup.

2. Retweeting Everything – The re-tweet (RT) functionality lends a sense of community and connectivity to Twitter by showing other people some of the cool stuff you find.    This works until a person decides that everything they read is worthy of everyone else reading, which it isn’t.   It never is.    I don’t care how awesome the people are that you follow, repeating everything they say to all your followers is extremely annoying and agitating.     If we thought they were just as awesome, we’d be following them ourselves.    Don’t force us to follow by proxy because we won’t.

3.  Retweeting Instead of Replying — Hey, I get it;  you not only want to make a cute quip back to someone, but you want everyone on your list to see how clever you are, too.   And that’s fine here or there.   Doing it every time as a matter of form falls under the same umbrella as Sin #2 — if we wanted to see your repartee, we’d be following both of you.   You’re not that funny.

4.  Confusing Twitter with IM — This is a case of the right tool for the right job.    Twitter is not Instant Messaging.    IM is not Twitter.   Using Twitter to hold endless conversations with another as if it were IM causes your followers to gouge their eyes out.    “But they can’t see it when I reply, ” you say, “remember Sin #3?”    True, dear Tweep, but if I’m following BOTH of you, I can see everything passing between.    The occasional comment and snarky reply is fine — in fact, sometimes it’s great — but watching a day-long jab-fest?  No thanks.

5.  Blabbering — You know the sort, right?   The Tweep that just yaks and yaks and yaks because they are bored or they think their followers actually care that they just took a triple-S and are now sucking on a doughnut.   The rule here is minimalism, that’s why it’s limited to 140 characters — if you don’t have something interesting to say, please don’t feel the need to fill in the silence with endless tweets about the mundane.

6.  Follow-Mongering — Hey, I like followers, who doesn’t, right?   But constantly harping on how many or how few you have, or how often they reply to you, retweet you, or DM you only makes you look like a self-centered jackass.   If you’re interesting or funny or useful, you’ll be followed, and if not — you won’t!   Simple formula.   Followers gained through coercion are not quality.

7.  Tweeting the Play-by-Play — I realize that VeryImpressiveSportsTeam vs. HugeRival is a hell of a game and you wish you had an entire living room full of similarly-interested peeps to slurp nachos and cheer at every point, but the rest of us really don’t give a crap.    Want to give an update on the score or a general, overall comment?  Fine.     Going to put some indignant crap about SomePlayer and how he just got totally screwed on that play by BlindRef on Twitter?   FOUL.

8.  Confusing your Audiences — Twitter is not Facebook, nor is it Tumblr, Digg,  LinkedIn, Slashdot, IM, your blog or any other site on the Internet.   The audience you generate through Twitter is unique because the service itself generates a different type of follower than your friends/buddies/contacts on other sites.    What goes as a good status update in one place may not be great in another, so feel out your audience and give them what they enjoy, not what you are too lazy to adjust.

9.  Spoilers — If you interactively reveal the winner to SomeRealityShow, OtherBigEvent that everyone and their dog is watching, or MajorBigMovie, I will personally come over and whack you on the forehead with a tack hammer.   Not all of us watch at the same time; be courteous of those who may have DVRed it because they had to play with their kid for an evening.

10.  No Context – Tweeting or Retweeting something without context leaves your readers in the dark and confused as they search to figure out what you are even talking about.   Don’t make your tweeps work to follow you, it should be a pleasure — always enhance and improve anything you are passing on to the masses.

En Conclusion:

There’s many, many things I enjoy about Twitter — the clever folks, the funny tweets, the pictures of some guy’s wife’s cans, the poignant tweets that make me stop and think and wish I said it.    And if you are one of the folks that regularly cranks out high quality stuff like the above (especially the boobie shots), I salute you and enjoy following you terribly much.

There is, however, no need for all that great quality to be lost in the flood of crap from all the other people who doink up the network.    And some of them come out with really, really great stuff, but it’s all encased in feces and I don’t have time to sort through it all.

Keep it simple, keep it worthy, keep it relevant, keep it interesting.   Short and sweet is the mantra of Twitter and by avoiding the sins above, we’re going to have a long, long twife together.

I found the neat site, Wordle.net, courtesy of Billygean today, and decided to create one for this blog.    So, without further ado, here’s the Wordle for PhilosYphia.      Go create your own Wordle!

This year’s Blog Action Day subject is, “Climate Change”, and there are thousands of bloggers around the world writing in on this subject from all sorts of angles — support, refutation, complaints, issues, problems solutions.    But in the end, no matter what your understanding or opinion on the subject, dealing with climate change issues comes down to a moral issue over all of them, and I think all sides can agree on that point.

Whether or not climate change is taking place or not, and regardless of whether that change (if it exists) is drastic or not, we still are behooved to apply our advances in technology and industry to lessen our negative impact on the world around us.     When the industrial revolution began, factories and homes spewed completely unfiltered dirty coal smoke into the air without any concern for its impact on the world — but then again, the technology had not progressed to the point where doing something about this pollution was feasible.     And yet,  nowadays we have numerous technologies to prevent contamination of the earth and yet we do not always apply them, or we are too willing to fore go them in favor of a higher number on the corporate earnings report.

For us to possess the technology and resources to minimize our impacts and not do so is deplorable at best and downright evil at worst.   The exploitation of any resource by the human race has been generally frowned-upon by history in the past; will we be found in the future to have been apathetic about our responsibility to the planet that gave us so much?

Catastrophic climate change or fearmongering activist hype — which ever side of the battle, or area in between, that you plant yourself in this debate, the result is the same:   Should we not be doing better by the Earth since we clearly have the ability?

I think the answer by anyone involved is — or should be — a resounding, “Yes!”

Everyone’s a salesperson, right?  The question is, how do you sell yourself without becoming a dick?

Lately I’ve been thinking and exploring a lot of ideas about selling yourself and making what you do into not just your résumé, but a brand.      Why should I care?   Well, it seems to me that people get further when they’re instantly associated with doing a particular thing, or they’re well-known for something, or they have a very distinct way of presenting themselves.   This is how stars on YouTube are born, celebrities make a splash, and impressive professionals leave an indelible impression on everyone they work with.

I was talking to my wife about this because we’re trying to come up with a solid representation of her crafting work as a brand that we can use to do up her website, make business cards, brochures, and generally give her something distinct that she can use over and over and everyone will know what, “Kanga Crafts” is at the end of the day.    It’s a way to make it easy to identify, easy to market, and something that will leave an impression.

Think about the most popular brands you know and how they are all-pervasive — Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Wal*Mart, and even places like Fuddruckers, while slightly offensive, are nonetheless very well-known.    It’s an imagine, right or wrong, pleasant or horrible, that everyone can bring to mind right away with just a single word, image, or mark.

But there’s a limit to it, too.    There’s plenty of marketing folks and sales folk and PR people and companies that go too far and make an impression that just stinks of ego and hubris.   They radiate “dick” thicker than musk and just choke the life out of everyone they encounter rather than enhance it.    Even in the blogosphere you hear all about SEO, high-ranking, monetization, optimization, and so forth, all with the sole intent of making a website a cash cow.    It’s why I shy away from making this an ad-driven site because even I block a lot of that content these days.

For a good example of marketing over-dick in progress, check out this video of Joel Bauer describing the marketing power of business cards.     Don’t you just want to whack him with a broomstick?  And I know it’s an act for a purpose, but at the same time, wow.

So, there’s a right way to market and brand an idea or a service and there’s definitely a wrong way.     I think for the most part I’m not marketing myself or my abilities nearly enough, and my wife and I have to figure out how to really pass off her elite crafting skills as a household name, but at the same time trying not to come across like a pompous jackass.

And you thought closing a sale looked easy.

Today my Twitter On Paper arrived!   For those of you who don’t know about this project, a guy named Sam Potts in Brooklyn, NY, decided that he would allow people to request that he write down, on paper, any Tweet he had previously made and mail it to the requesting person, free of charge.   He has just finished the project, capped at 1,000 hand-written and mailed Tweets, and I am now possessing one of them because I requested one before he finished — this is so cool!

So, here’s the envelope as it arrived.    Note that Sam has some incredibly good handwriting:

Opening the envelope, I find two sheets of paper, one with a greeting from Sam on it, the other with my Tweet-on-Paper:

The greeting sheet reads, “Thank you for participating in Twitter on Paper.   You’re always welcome to send something* back, if you like, no obligation!    Sam Potts, Somestreet, Brooklyn, NY 11215   *of equal or lesser value, of course!”

I will definitely be sending something back to Sam, but I have to think of something really creative and good.   I want to thank him for trying something pretty novel and curious and footing the entire bill for it.

My Tweet-on-Paper:

It reads:   “Ok no kidding people — when you get your ToP, do not blog about it.   Do not spread the word in any way.  This thing is already out of hand.” and it is stamped, “Jun 8 2009“.

The rules of Twitter-on-Paper stated that requestors had to specify a tweet that Sam had made himself, because he is the only owner of his own Tweets and the only one that has the legal copyright to distribute them as he wishes.   I picked the above Tweet because it’s kinda ironic — he’s Tweeting about the very thing that I requested.    A local black hole ought to open up near here any moment…

I think I’ll go and find a suitable frame for this little piece of Internet culture — after all, who knows in 5 years where Twitter and so forth will be?

A huge thanks to Sam Potts and his curiously fun little project — I love my Twitter on Paper!