I’ve read a few posts recently in the blogosphere (such as this one by Mike Arsenault) about “twitter snobs” – and basically whether one should, or shouldn’t, automatically follow everyone who follows you.
As with so many things, some people will argue vehemently that their way is “right”; others will be more pragmatic – explaining why they’ve got the approach they have & why they realise others have different views.
My personal view is to look (periodically) at new followers & decide on an individual basis. The most recent person to follow me, well, I’m trying to work out her strategy of following. She’s only following me & Ellen Degeneres; she’s only made 1 update & hasn’t got a profile. I don’t think I know her (she’s from Colarado for starters); however, as she said in that one update she’s looking at using Twitter with her (doctoral) students, and given that she has selected me to follow, I decided to follow her back.
(Most people who follow me & only have 1 update are either gloating about the fact they’ve got a laptop for free [I ignore them] – or someone I’ve encouraged to have a look – & I generally know them for real. [Tend to follow them!)
Thanks for the mention. I’m very similar to you in how I determine who I will follow. I always look at a person’s profile and who they are following. If they are involved in education I’ll typically follow them back. I ignore porn stars, bots, and people who use profanity in their tweets.
I really like to find people with different beliefs than my own. I find they stretch my thinking and keep my thoughts balanced.
hi!
Of course if you are like Stephen Fry Or President Obama you have far too many followers to cope with, so you can ignore them!
By the way thought you might be interested in
http://artythings.posterous.com/blog-experiment, or at least the Posterous element. It allows you yo post to two blogs at once via email seems to work ok to even on wordpress.
I’ve heard of several people recommending Posterous … I’ve used the blog feature in Flock to update several blogs. My gut feeling, re. anything that can have an email update is that userweb won’t allow it. I know i’ve tried the email option within WordPress & also in Elgg when I was testing that & neither worked, which I blamed on userweb. (especially as both let me set up the email posting when they were hosted elsewhere)