I was added to a couple more Twitter Lists today. My total is now 190 200. Small potatoes compared with the likes of Robert Scoble (4,297) or Guy Kawasaki (5,743). But it’s a fascinating new metric. It’s the new measure of cool. How many people are really listening to your tweets? How useful or interesting are you? Do you add any value to the conversation? All those questions are answered, in a way, by the number of Twitter lists you’re on.
And by the topic of those lists. I love being included on Female Geek lists, like Social Media Mavens and Femmes Digitales.
Then there’s the awesome randomness of it. I say awesome because I’m becoming an increasing fan of crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd. Neither are perfect. In fact they are messy and imprecise. But over the long haul crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd are ever so much more revealing than top-down pronouncements. Time’s Person of the Year, for example. Why the heck should the editors at Time sit around a table to select this person? And why do we so dumbly accept their choice? Except for You, in 2006, which was spot on.
This challenges everything I’ve grown up with, BTW. I was trained as a print journalist. Editors made the choices. We knew what was best, what readers should hear about and how the story should be shaped. Well, turns out we don’t.