A New Years Follow Friday

Follow Friday is one of my favorite twitter concepts. However, when you are following more than 200 people, it begins to get unwieldy to track ones favorites, at 500 it gets hard to track even the new favorites. On my seemingly infinitely long to-do list, I have this plan to make up some public twitter lists that classifies the people I follow into groups so I can recommend them that way. I have started, and while I am not happy enough with the results. I am making a few of my lists public. In the meantime, I though I would write a posting about different people I admire on twitter, who tweet in ways I don't or can't. This isn't all my favorite tweeps, just some representative ones.

And, that gets to the next part of my introduction to this post, like many of you, I'm busy with things other than twitter a lot of the time. The time I take for twitter has to come from somewhere and I can't always find it. Especially, when, like now, I am behind at work.

The only good side of that is that I work for Intel on developing internet security products that can go into Intel's chips. As part of my job, I became an "ambassador" which is a program in Intel to let those of us who are interested write blogs and tweets and share our expertise. That's how I can justify writing this. And, as always, this is simply my opinions and not something blessed by Intel.

Intel is quite good about the program in that they don't tell us what to write about (although they do give us little prepackaged tweets that cover topics Intel wants people to hear about, but we can send them or not at our discretion and even change them to match our voice) and are more concerned about things we shouldn't write about (like giving out insider information that could impact the company or pre-announcing something before the normal marketing or legal folks are ready for it to be announced). For a person like me, who is in a narrow niche, and doesn't have a marketing role, that means I don't have a lot of pressure to write about specific things. Therein lies my first recommendation. If you want more and better Intel specific info, the @IntelEmbedded/intel-embedded-ambassador list has tweeps qualified in areas I know nothing about.

Thus, in 2009, I've been finding my twitter voice, and learning who am I am who I am not. That brings me back to the topic of this blog entry, a pointer to some people who I admire, but who tweet or blog in ways I cannot do.

When I first got onto twitter I figured I could use it to get headlines from my favorite news sources, like Scientific American, and The Register. Sure enough they are there. You will still find me RTing @ElReg and because it covers topics in my specific niche, things I figure people might not know about otherwise. I also found some new sources that I didn't know before like ReadWriteWeb (@RWW), @DarkReading, and @HelpNetSecurity.

Not on that list are some of the "big names" in twitter. I figure most people can find CNN, Mashable, and Guy Kawasaki on their own. Moreover, RTg them, except when its on a specifically interesting topic to me, is simply adding "noise".

That gets back to one of the things I am not. I don't tweet a lot of general interest info, not even a lot of "twitter" interest info. In fact, not even a lot of "scientific" or "computer" interest info. Mostly you will find me tweeting about online computer security. (Or if you happen to follow me and some of my friends, occassionally engaged in the luxury of a brief conversation.)

I do have some favorite sources outside of my narrow topics, such as the folks at Bit Rebels (@adamsconsulting, @mistygirlph, @clementyeung to name a few). I also follow @Lanny_S, @terrinakamura, @bkmacdaddy, and @flipbooks for high quality general interest links. I also find the women at Geek Girls Network site (like @GeekGirls and @ArkhamAsylumDoc) interesting to read. If you want to know who I read just for interest, you can look at the list @intel_chris/personal. These are the tweeps I read just because I like what they say (or how they say it). It also includes people who I'm curious as to whether I will like.

But mainly, as I said, I talk about computer security, privacy, and related topics like cyberbullying. From that I draw my main list @intel_chris/security-all. This list has almost everyone that has tweeted about security or privacy issues. It's also my "main" tweetdeck column, the first thing I scan when I want to know what I should be retweeting. I have started sub-dividing this list into smaller lists, but that project will take time, and this is the list I actually follow, so it is better in that regard.

The last list that corresponds to a tweetdeck column is my programming list, @intel_chris/programming. As you might guess, these are people who I discuss programming issues with.