Jason Calacanis (founder of Weblogs, Inc., Mahalo) caused quite a stir today when he offered a serious sum of money to Twitter to be listed on the “suggested users” list on Twitter. A little bit of background: the suggested users list has catapulted people like Britney Spears and Kevin Rose to 250,000+ followers. I can understand Jason’s offer and his frustration as well – this user list has been seemingly arbitrarily put together and has converted to a phenomenal amount of followers for the people in question. There is immense value in a massive list of followers that are genuinely interested in following you and your updates – for example, let’s say that 10% of your followers list will view your link or view your message details – that’s almost 25,000 people at that instant. And that’s not counting retweets, social bookmarking, and digg referrals.

This 10% number is not out of thin air, however. I measure the clicks on the links that I tweet out through Hootsuite every so often. Out of the 160 followers that I have, on average – I usually receive 25-30 click throughs. Assuming that some of these clicks might ahve been for fun, a 10% rate is a conservative amount that could maybe be applied to other users and the nature of their followers. No one’s saying that it can’t be higher, however.

This has also serious implications about a potential revenue stream for Twitter. If people or even companies are willing to pay to be on this list – maybe, just maybe, there can be a sponsored users list. I’m jumping to naming this list the “sponsored” users list, because once the online community realizes that this list has been tainted with users that are paying themselves in, the genuine suggestive nature of the list can be seriously compromised.

Link: The amount and value of Twitter traffic

Here’s a little fun tool from Waggeneredstrom, a worldwide communications firm. They’ve utilized Twitter’s API to analyze “twendz” on Twitter: essentially, rating positive and negative feedback using key words scattered in tweets. This technology works by running every word they see related to the particular brand or product in question with their “positive/negative” ranking database. For example, “suck” and “poor” and “horrible” would be negative words – in a massive database of ranked words.

What happens next has phenomenal online “environmental assessment” implications. Each “keyword” you search, if popular enough, will have around 70 tweets that will be analyzed by this service at any given moment. It will gauge the positive or negative sentiments surrounding your brand or product at any given time.

It still has its flaws – for example, keywords like “Rogers” can me mixed with people like Ted Rogers – a lot of keywords can be mistaken for another thing. There is a lot of potential with other tools like this though – Twitter – as I’ve mentioned before – is now truly becoming the real true realtime search engine for anything (public opinion, and, even health trends).

Link: Twendz

Our addiction to real-time, concise, brief, and ADHD-enhanced media is causing blogs to lose their authority in the “statusphere”. According to Brian Solis at TechCrunch, with over 133 million blogs today, their value is dwindling.

Although I disagree that we should ignore blogs or even start phasing them out – they are the true content creators. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and other social tools only share original content. In Groundswell’s Social Technographics: we see the importance of content creators. Blogs are the perfect platform to ensure brevity, completeness, and true online media coverage and content creation.

A brilliant takeaway idea for this would be a micro-feed specialized replacement for Technorati: a specialized search engine and ranking system for real-time, micro-sharing services. I think this is an idea that Twitter should definitely experiment with.

Twitter’s search engine, purchased from Summize a few months ago, effectively cements Twitter’s enormous potential as being the first true real-time search engine. Ranking trackbacks, re-tweets, and other connections in and out from tweets would be a great way to link buzz-generating resources connecting in and out of Twitter’s sharing platform. Twitter is, essentially, a sharing platform as well.

Link: TechCrunch: Are Blogs Losing Status?

Here’s an interesting article by Allan Mutter that advocates for paid content with major “legit” media producers. His main concern revolves around reducing the stigma of “free” around the web’s quality content and charging to help keep “legit” alive. Chris Anderson (from Wired) may disagree though – as much as I believe that legitimate content is important to preserve on the internet, there are alternative sources of income that have “costed” the customer or the consumer at least something (i.e. advertisements and “free” subscriptions). By foregoing your contact details, interest habits, and behaviors, companies can convert your involvement into a more valuable advertisement target – which will increase the advertising potential and revenue of any site with many users.

Charging for content may be a very selfish way to go about preserving the media industry – but it may compromise the very fiber of the internet and all the standards that it has grown and been built upon. The question is – will you charge, if others start charging?

Link: Why The Media Must Charge for Web Content

Here’s a great article about SEO for enterprises and how that has failed to a large extent for major corporations that feel that paid search is an easy way out for gaining sufficient awareness and face time for consumers who search.

Several instances are noted – Cottonelle – a major corporation – has an all-flash website that isn’t friendly to spiders – and Lenovo, that has missed out on rerouting Google past their country-selector page and has compromised Google’s ability to make a meaningful cached version of their website.

An additional problem lies in several websites that don’t drive traffic from their specific brands but drive traffic from specific long-tail searches – this is summarized well here:

It depends–but especially for large retailers,  SEO is important. It’s sites like Bizrate, eBay, and Nexttag that keep showing up in the top of Google when searching for Long Tail queries like “yellow queen size flannel sheets”.

These results suck. Where are the brands/enterprises that carry this merchandise? Where is JCPenney? Target? LL Bean? Lands End? They might be advertising through PPC, but 85% of consumers click on the natural listings.

How will you attempt to mend the rift the divides IT capabilities from inherently marketing-related initiatives? How can IT and Marketing live together and progress in a more unified way?

Link: SEO at the Enterprise Level a Major Flop