Clark's Spot

During a road trip this past Friday, I grabbed a magazine from the unread pile to catch up on some reading. Turns out my Outside subscription has expired. (I’ll get a renewal/resubscribe in after getting my next check – or I’ll go back to reading it online.) And it turns out I was way behind on my reading. The issue I grabbed was September 2008, which was great – it had an article that coincided nicely with the Hot, Flat, and Crowded book that I had read.

The article is the written exchange of two of the magazine’s editors in a competition to track their energy use. I had downloaded my electric bill about a month earlier, and I decided to join in the comparison a year late (and without the technological gadget). Without the special software, I would only be able to estimate my daily use. That’s still good enough for me to begin to understand how much power my wife and I use compared to other households.

First, I checked out PPL’s website, which lets consumers access special tools to understand their electricity use. I downloaded the account history and looked at the kilowatts used. Big increases in the winter months and valleys in the summer. Our rented half-double has no insulation (we’ve bugged the landlord about it to no avail – and without much opportunity to look for other options). That means the heating unit uses plenty of electricity trying to keep the old house warm during the cold winters. We topped out at 693 kilowatts in February 2008 – before we began dialing the thermostat way down during the day. Our best full month was July 2007 when we used 336 kilowatts.

An easy spreadsheet formula gave me the number of days in each billing period. From there, it was easy to track the average kilowatts per day. The Outside article (if you didn’t follow the link) says the average American household uses 30.25 kWh per day. The most we used was 23.1 kilowatts in February 2008, and our best month was 10.5 kilowatts in July 2007. The two competing editors fell between about 8 and 18 kilowatts. I have some work to stay in their league. My median was 14.86 kWh, and the mean was 15.28 kWh. There aren’t big fluctuations in our energy use except for a few key months when it really spikes.

Average daily electricity use

I wondered what the trend was from year to year. I took a few minutes to reconfigure the chart to map out the monthly use over the course of 2007, 2008, and 2009 – and I checked the mean for each of the 12 months. So far in 2009, we’ve been below the monthly average every month except for January.

I’ve actually followed the average pretty closely for most of this year. August heat and air conditioners have driven up our electricity in the past – that’s something we haven’t done this year with a cooler summer. Look like the windows are staying open this year, and I’m looking for ideas on how to winterize.

Twitter has two advantages over Facebook and other social networking sites. The open set-up makes it easier to follow people who you don’t know. This builds weak ties and grows your network further outside your social circle than you would normally look. Secondly, the hashtag system makes it easier to track updates from events and to connect with individuals through those events.

This focuses on the second point. I’ll follow up on the loose ties in a later post.

Hashtags bring some order to the large number of posts in the Twitterverse. Remember, my simplified view of Twitter is a giant chatroom where you are trying to get your message through the din. Your task is to figure out who you want to get and receive direct messages from. Hashtags help you sort through that noise if you’re interested in a specific topic. It lets you see a sign in the chatroom that your topic is being discussed in a certain corner, and you can go to that corner to hear everyone else espouse their thoughts on your topic.

Say that you’re interested in the annual Comic-Con show. #comiccon lets you track what other folks are saying about the show. You see where other people are spending their time at the show. It makes it easier to meet more people in real life who share your interests – which spreads your network and influence. And your more powerful network is much better than a few new followers.

That means the real world component of hashtags is important. If #you write sentences just to #include #metadata, you help #computers – not #people. Tags should be rare and should be unobtrusive. Take a look at Dave Coustan’s post. I’m not sure that I’d unfollow, but I like his comparisson to the NPR piece. They shouldn’t interfere with your ability to read the post.

Help sort – but don’t go overboard. Take a look at the directory on hashtags.org to see how out-of-control it can get. Hashtags remain an advantage for Twitter only as long as they don’t get in the way of the conversation AND they build loose ties.

I’ve got a dirty secret. I’m not sure that social networking is The Next Big Thing.

This isn’t something that I want to say too loudly. A large component of my job entails going on social networking sites and blogging platforms to update information and exchange messages with people. Almost impossible not to have some version of a social networking strategy today.

I remember geocities, tripod, and angelfire. When’s the last time you visited one of those sites? (Millennials: Do you even know what they are?)

Somebody new started following me on Twitter yesterday. I took a few moments today to check out the guy to see whether I wanted to follow him. As I write this, he’s following 47,947 people. He has 48,302 followers. Made it easy to decide. I’m not following him. Nothing important will come from him. And he doesn’t really care what his nearly 48,000 people are saying to him. He’s in a room full of people and nobody’s listening.

LinkedIn had to limit connections to 30,000 users earlier this year. Which, obviously, cramped the style of the people who really actually network with 30,001 people.

Count me as a skeptic of the more is better idea. I think meaningful online conversations and relationships have a limit. At some point, information overload is simply human nature.

50,000 followers is nothing if they aren’t listening. And if they aren’t listening, they’re able to walk away from the network – and your messages.

I’m approaching a period at work where we’ll be able to tear apart and remake what we’re doing online with our social network programs. And as I’m scratching out my thoughts before the planning sessions, I’m thinking about being effective – about the difference between being busy and being productive. I want the people who friend and follow us to think about us.

There’s a lot of clutter out there. Until we get past the more-is-better phase and look-how-important-I-am mentality, social networking will remain a fad rather than part of the answer.

Thanks to M. Keefe on Flickr for the photo.

When I created this blog, WordPress was proud to give me some statistics about how popular its blogs are. This is one of 148,129 new posts created today.

Stats are all over the place about how many messages a person receives in a normal day. Lots of studies have talked about this saturation.

How many people are receiving the messages? How many of the 37 million-plus words written on WordPress or its platforms (as of my writing this) are read?

That’s what this blog is (now – updated 11:10 p.m.) about.

In a time of user-generated content, can all of the stuff being created actually be meaningfully consumed? How – without spamming everyone who’s a friend, connection, or follower – can I get my message distributed. And am I sending the best message to them?