Today has already been incredibly hectic, on and offline. I got out of my morning meetings a few hours ago and immediately wanted to play some catch online, especially due to the incredibly insightful commenting happening on my last post. Seriously…there are some brains below that post. I’m planning a follow-up to that to highlight some male bloggers I’m aware of, but if you’ve got some you dig, please leave a note over there in the comments.
Anyway, I sit down and I send some of you cool cats tweet replies and BAM, I find out I’m listed on Len Kendall’s 30 Under 30 Tweeters list, which I had no idea was even happening. I was totally blindsided and hugely flattered. I sort of didn’t know what to say, who to say it to, or how it happened. The hashtag if you want to drop in on Twitter to find other honorees is #30u30t.
As Len put it, “You could say that #30u30t mirrors the NCAA Top 25 Coaches Poll…except for microblogging.”
I’m still totally stunned, but I’m moreso impressed with the approach he took to building this list. There’s a lot of different sources out there trying to tell you who to follow, and nearly all of them rank everyone based on some metric like following ratios, retweets, and the rest. They all tend to look the same, and they all tend to encourage some sort of competition or something.
Twitter in general is slowly moving away from this behavior; the mad rush to have the most followers has passed, I think. It certainly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny in the real value of the tool, and as people get more and more accustomed to the environment I think they see that numbers matter a lot less than actual value.
Len’s effort to produce a list (unranked, and called Mentors) of useful young twitter users kind of falls in line with the way I think people should approach twitter. All social tools, actually.
Even beyond that, the list is noted as a starting line, not a finish line. Version 1 means a Version 2, and because social media is constantly moving, so should the relative value of the people involved. No one gets a free pass. You don’t get to join a community and then act like an idiot, right? You don’t get to build trust and then undermine it. The web is reflecting human behavior more than ever before and the one thing we all have the hardest time doing is trusting one another.
Trust will always be the currency, and because there’s an ebb and flow to that, our efforts to highlight people who really add value or make themselves trustworthy should represent that.
I hope my humble amazement at inclusion has been fully expressed, because I really am touched by the mention.
However, I more so want to give Len and the team he put together kudos for the way they approached the whole thing.
What about you? In your opinion, who’s young and kicking butt online?
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