How do we create value when we’re busy tweeting, blogging, reading and writing? I have been arguing that to create value from information, we need to have systems in place that allow us to aggregate, filter and connect information – and that this is true for people, and for business models. These are the things that go on all the time behind the scenes when people are creating blog posts, and I thought it would be interesting to see how this actually happens.

Shortly after the unveiling of the iPad, Venessa Miemis wrote a post called ‘iPad: Overhyped Flop or a Case of Great Design Thinking?‘ Venessa has a distinctive talent for writing about complex topics in an integrative and creative manner, so I thought it would be interesting to ask her about how she put this post together.

Tim: What resources did you use to collect & keep track of all of the discussions surrounding the iPad?

Venessa:Ever since I started blogging regularly, starting in November 2009, I’ve used Twitter as my main tool for collecting resources. It’s taken months to build a network, but it’s been well worth it. I’m very satisfied with the quality of tweets that pass through my stream. For the iPad post, it wasn’t too hard to find the articles – the Twittersphere was abuzz with speculation and opinions about the iPad in the week leading up to the keynote and in the days following it.

I saved most of the articles that came from a media outlet (Wired, New York Times, engadget, PopSci), and then paid attention to the articles by individual bloggers that were getting RT’d and referenced the most. I also used the #iPad hashtag to search what people on Twitter outside my immediate network were saying. I saved all of these links into delicious.

Comment: Twitter ended up acting as both an aggregation tool and a filter. The assumption behind Venessa’s strategy here is between the tweets from own network, which is large, and through searching that she would find most of the relevant commentary on the iPad. The filtering aspect is interesting – when we choose to follow someone on twitter, we are in part relying on them to choose the best things that they encounter to tweet about. So our network is doing a lot of the work in terms of filtering.

Tim: Did you use any tools to sort out the themes, or did you just work it out in your head?

Venessa: The themes emerged from the posts themselves. As I read through them, it seemed the implications of the iPad could be framed around three main areas: business, education, and leisure.

Comment: Here’s where I’m a lousy interviewer, because this is the key part of the process and I didn’t ask very good questions here (but see Venessa’s comment for more). But the value in the post is that it did not simply aggregate all the online discussion about the iPad. After collecting all the information that she could find, Venessa selected further by picking what appeared to be the key posts about the iPad.

Then, she connected up ideas by grouping them into themes. For me, this is the entire reason that the post works so well – it is the creative connecting. It’s also interesting that Venessa covers this in one line. It’s very typical that this step is hard to describe. We often talk about themes ‘emerging’ from our collected reading. As I’ve said before, connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act – and when you read the post, you can see how Venessa did this extensively in writing it.

After we connect up ideas, then we have to connect our ideas to people to get them to spread:

Tim: How did you promote the post?
Venessa: At 2:06pm on Feb 1st, I tweeted this:

At 5:03pm on Feb 1st, Tim O’Reilly tweeted:

That day, there were 3,672 visits to the site. The next day had 5,297. The next day had 1,690, and since then there have been between 700 – 1,000 visits daily. The post has received 21 trackbacks, and 121 comments (although I answer almost every comment, so you can subtract that by half). It was one of the top 20 posts on wordpress.com on February 3rd.

At the time of this writing, bit.ly shows the link has been clicked 7,785 times.

I also just found out that the post was mentioned on Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Tech” podcast on February 7th by Baratunde Thurston.

Tim: Can you track how the idea travelled?

Venessa: With over 1.4 million followers, it’s clear that Tim O’Reilly’s influence is far-reaching. Normally when I post a new article, I’ll get around 400-700 visits. Last week I had over 14,000.

I did get a big influx of new followers on Twitter (250+) within those first 48 hours, but I don’t know what percentage of that translated into new blog followers.

This has been a really interesting experience, and more a display of the power of influence than anything else. I wouldn’t say the quality of that post was particularly higher than any others I’ve written. It was just super topical and given exposure by a highly influential person within the tech community. In order to get a post go that viral again, I may just have to be patient until Steve Jobs builds hype for whatever comes after the iPad.

Oh, and another thing to mention, which I thought was interesting – though I received 10 times the amount of traffic, I only got about twice as many comments…..so maybe 14,000 visits and only 50 comments. which to me says a lot about the amazing community that has grown around the blog. Though I may not get huge daily numbers with my traffic, a lot of people comment and engage and interact, and that’s what has made the blog so interesting. The posts are primers, but the conversations that follow is where a lot of insights and tips come in. So though I saw the power of influence via traffic, the quality of traffic I already had is unmatched.

Comment: There’s obviously a lot to say about connecting up ideas and people here. First, the traffic spike from Tim O’Reilly came as a result of the quality of idea connections in the post. There were hundreds (probably thousands) of posts about the iPad that week. Venessa’s did well because of the synthesis. That’s what led to the post getting into a traffic network with so many people in it.

I think this sheds some light on the question of the value of transient traffic. Venessa’s blog regularly gets a lot of very good, thoughtful comments as she mentions. This is because of the community that has built up around the blog (connecting ideas to people!). Because that community was already there, I think it made it easier for her to capture some value from the huge spike in traffic that she got. Double the number of comments is actually pretty good – it is sure more than you’d expect if transient traffic is ‘worthless’. Same with an increase of 250 people following on twitter. I suspect that regular RSS feed readers probably took a spike too. If you’re creating good intellectual value, it increases the connective value of transient traffic.

Finally, a lot of people talk about information aggregation as something that creates value in and of itself. Because it is a relatively easy thing to do, this why a lot of people dismiss Amazon and Google as ‘merely aggregators’. But the value doesn’t come from simply aggregating. The real value comes from aggregating information, filtering it effectively, and then creatively connecting ideas.

All three parts of the process must be done well in order to create value from information. I hope that this behind the scenes peek at the making of ‘iPad: Overhyped Flop or a Case of Great Design Thinking’ provides some insight into how the process works.

I was at the mall yesterday eating lunch, and I took a moment to listen to the conversations going on around me. They were, without exception, utterly banal. Consequently, I concluded that conversation is a useless tool, and the widespread use of it is nothing more than a symptom of the widespread decline of intellectual discourse, manners, and civilisation as a whole.

Stupid, right? That’s a riff on Clay Shirky’s response to people that complain about the quality of discourse within social networks.

The latest version of that complaint comes from Tom Davenport on the HBR Blog, who asks for us to tweet about something important:

Almost 50 years ago, FCC Commissioner Newton Minow suggested that the then-new medium of television was becoming a “vast wasteland.” One could argue that the same fate is befalling social media.

So here we are again: a promising new medium being used largely for vapid chattering about celebrities. Couldn’t these technologies be used for good?

Here’s an analogy: bird calls. When Nancy and I started birding one of the things that we learned was bird calls. When we’re actively birding, we’re pretty alert to everything, because we want to know where the birds are. However, when we’re working at home, we pay less attention to the calls. And since we’ve got a yard that is pretty attractive to birds, there are a lot of calls.

The vast majority of bird calls don’t contain too much information. The most common form of call is what ornithologists refer to as ‘chip calls’, which are short, brief calls that birds use to let other birds know where they are. It can help them find food (lots of chips in one area), it can keep them from straying from the flock (most of the chips moving further away), and it simply be a Horton-Hears-a-Who type ‘here I am’ call or an ‘everything’s fine’ call. When we’re working at home, we don’t pay any attention to these calls at all.

However, the birds also have a few calls that contain a whole lot of information. We’re particularly interested in the calls that say ‘predator’. That usually means there’s something pretty interesting in the yard, like a Goshawk, or this Carpet Python:

We only got to see that snake because we heard the bird calls, followed them, and found the snake.

So we’re filtering the bird calls in our heads all the time, waiting to find the interesting bits. We need to do the same thing with conversations (well, maybe not the conversations at the mall food courts…), and social networks like twitter. Most of the words used in these media are like birds’ chips. We need to find the words that contain data. How can we do this?

Howard Rheingold is in the middle of putting together of series of tutorials about Mindful Infotention that explain a few different methods that work.

These are fantastic videos that are well worth your time. In the one above, Rheingold makes several important points. He demonstrates the use of several different tools for aggregating and filtering information on a topic that is of interest to you. He has step-by-step instructions that make it pretty easy to track down specific information from streams that are on average not very useful.

Rheingold also talks about two different forms of filtering – algorithmic and personal. He correctly recommends using a combination of the two. Algorithmic filtering includes tools like PostRank, which uses a formula to determine which posts are most relevant to your search. Personal filtering takes place on sites like delicious and diigo, where you can find the pages that the highest number of people have bookmarked, or the pages that specific people have saved. There’s also using your network to help filter.

Rheingold makes an absolutely critical point at the end of the video – it’s not enough to simply aggregate information, and filter it so that you have only the most relevant information. You also have to do something with it! The information is no good unless you connect it up:

The important part, as I stressed at the beginning, is in your head. It really doesn’t do any good to multiply the amount of information flowing in, and even filtering that information so that only the best gets to you, if you don’t have a mental cognitive and social strategy for how you’re going to deploy your attention.

There is a wealth of great information being shared on a constant basis within social media and elsewhere. None of it does us any good at all if we can’t find the bits that are useful to us in solving the problems on which we’re interested in working. But if we filter well, we’ll discover that we actually are tweeting about things that are important.

(I’ll also just note that Howard is currently getting treated for cancer – the prognosis sounds encouraging, and I hope that he pulls through it in good shape.)

Last week I talked about 19th century communication networks, Charles Darwin, and how we have had more information coming at us than we’ve known what to do with for a long time. It seems like it is a problem caused by the internet, but the roots are much deeper. I’ve also been saying for some time that the way to effectively deal with information is to use an aggregate, filter and connect strategy. This works when you’re building a business model for an information-based enterprise, and it works for individuals as well. I’ve run across more evidence of the latter this weekend, reading David Quammen’s book The Kiwi’s Egg, describing Darwin’s development of the concept of natural selection.

In my earlier post I talked about Darwin’s extensive network and prolific letter writing. These were the tools that he used to aggregate information. For evidence of filtering and connecting, here is a quote from Quammen:

He was reading widely in the literature of exploration and natural history, plus a diverse selection of books on animal and plant breeding, history, and philosophy of science and he had begun putting cryptic questions to anyone who knew anything about the odd, targeted topics that interested him… Clues, clues, clues. What did they signify, how did they fit? The cuckoos of Java versus the cuckoos of Sumatra and the Philippines – species or varieties? He wanted every possible piece of relevant data, whatever the source. He went to the Regent’s Park Zoo to see its newly acquired orangutan. He became a greedy amasser of seemingly unconnected facts. He busted his brain to connect them. It was an intense program of research and cogitation.

Aggregate, filter and connect. Darwin did a lot of all three over the 20 years between his arrival back at the end of the voyage of the Beagle and publication of The Origin of Species. And his breakthrough came because of the novel combinations of ideas that he developed. No one previously had connected the success that animal breeders had with artificial selection with a theory of natural evolution. No one previously had given much thought to the amount of variety found within species, because there was no theory to connect those facts to. Combining ideas is a central part of the innovation process – and Darwin was particularly skilled at it.

Darwin’s network of correspondents was awesome – and we can still learn a great deal now from studying how he effectively used his connections to get his ideas to spread. He wasn’t on Twitter, but if he had been, some of his writing would have worked on it:

There is a grandeur in this view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction.

From so simple a beginning, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have evolved.

True, he would have had to have found a shorter word than ‘infinitesimal’ in the second bit, but still… And of course, Twitter is not the best medium for building one long argument, as he did in Origin. Nevertheless, Darwin’s aggregate, filter and connect approach is one that we can all use now – and we all probably should. I can think of worse people to emulate.