I wrote an article for the Missouri Venture Forum’s monthly newsletter with this subject, mentioning some of the useful things that new business owners can do with Twitter. Given that many retailers are now calling this year the “Twitter Christmas” it is worth reading. You can download the entire PDF, my article is towards the end of the issue.

Paul Gillin and I have restarted our ever-popular series of podcasts called MediaBlather. This week we interview Adam Christensen, the head of social media communications for IBM. Just get a look at some of these stats:

• Internal blogs: 17,000
• Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
• Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
• IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
• IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
• IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000

You can download and listen to the podcast here.

In his ebook Detecting Malice, Robert Hansen has a difficult task. To compile in one place a variety of attack descriptions and forensic methods for various Internet intrusions. He does a great job of covering the landscape, talking in plain language without a lot of technical jargon and with many clear examples. If you have never read packet captures this book will be an eye opener, and if you have some exposure to hacking tools and Web traces then you will do fine with the examples that he portrays.

Think that your Web site is immune from these exploits? Think again. Just about everyone has some kind of exposure, and part of understanding exactly what that is is being able to get into the bad guys’ mindset and see how they can penetrate your servers.

I highly recommend this book, well worth the time and money. It will stimulate your thinking and certainly raise your level of paranoia, and perhaps level of motivation, to lock things down.

Today Cisco announced the winners of its AXP contest. If you haven’t heard of the contest before, you aren’t alone. It was an interesting combination of people, places and events. The goal was to design an application for a relatively new add-on module to Cisco routers called Application eXtension Platform (AXP), a Linux “blade” that allows third-party applications to be integrated with Cisco’s IOS router operating system and network applications. It has its own CPU and can store from 1 GB to 160 GB of data, depending on the model. Here is a more details Q&A about the AXP.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the contest and a $100,000 prize purse. They received 100 submissions from teams around the world, and the three finalists were announced this week. Check out the winning entry from MAD Network here – it is a very clever use of a variety of materials to explain their innovation, and I am sure one of the reasons why they won.

Brian Profitt, one of the judges in the contest, wrote about his experiences in a blog post here. When I spoke to him, he was very upbeat about his participation. “Initially, I was skeptical that we needed apps there on the AXP, but after seeing the apps from the contestants, I realized that it is a good thing and they made a believer out of me. It is definitely a platform that you can build something that is useful for businesses. Cisco could have kept this all to themselves and developed all of their apps in house. By having this contest, they opened the door for people that probably wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. They asked people to play with it, and certainly the prize was a big motivation, but this was a very significant move. I am hugely surprised and pleased by the number of international entrants. We had teams from all over the place – South American, Europe, elsewhere. I think this is a product of Cisco’s strength and how well they are known globally. I saw a number of women in the demo videos, which also was good too and runs counter to the notion that all coders are men.”

Profitt, who is the community manager for Linux.com, think that this is a very viable model for how you can really get developers into your enviroment. It also was his first time working with Cisco too.

With all the reports about blocked connections and such, the folks at Renesys have done their usual good and clear-headed analysis about what is working in terms of Internet routing into Iran in their post here. Unlike what has been reported in the general press, things aren’t as simple as a complete blackout, and there could be other reasons (such as a greater interest from the rest of the world) that is affecting the traffic patterns observed. 

Research from the Harvard Business school has found that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

I would like to see research that shows the relative utility of Twitter vs. social networks as the size of your followers/followed network increases. My thesis is that the bigger your Twittersphere, the less utility it has — the reverse I would think would be true of social networks.

When I was growing up as a nerdy teen on Long Island, needless to say I wasn’t one of the Popular Kids. Back then we called it Junior High rather than the current appellation Middle School and now nerds are now the new cool kids. In my youth, we didn’t have reality shows where beauties met their geeks, Bill Gates hadn’t yet gone to, let alone dropped out of college, and the Steves were still eating fruits rather than making Macs. We didn’t even have computers, phones still had dials on them, and we all watched one of three network TV channels and read newspapers that came in the afternoon. And all of our parents bought American-made cars.

Ok, enough nostalgia. I give this as background, to explain my own behavior when I started getting involved in social networks. My first thought was to collect as many “friends” as I could, to grow my network quickly and add just about everyone that I had an email address for. Now that I have accumulated a bunch of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plaxo, I have a different strategy.

I want quality rather than quantity. As my networks have grown – and they still aren’t as large as my college-age daughter (see, it is that underdog feeling again) – I have seen the “feed” streams that are produced from all these people just burying me in the details and status updates of their lives. I try to dip into this vast, deep flow of information on a daily basis, but it quickly overwhelms me. I run back to the relative comfort of my email inbox, where at least I can hit the delete key and pare things down to a reasonable single screen of to-do and action items and people that I have to return messages to.

Burger King ran a promotion not too long ago where they asked people to defriend 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free burger. They were swamped with thousands of requests, thereby establishing the value of a friend at somewhere around a quarter. That is pretty depressing. I always thought a friend was worth at least a couple of bucks, if not more.

I also want to grow my networks slower, because like anything else on the Internet, I am concerned about customer retention and my networks are my customers. You are the people that will (hopefully soon, puh-lease) pay me money to speak at a conference, write an article or white paper, produce a screencast video, or do some custom product consulting. So I don’t want to just spam you with needless updates about what I had for breakfast or insights about my pets or family vacations, although I did get some interesting feedback when I mention the books that I read in my last missive.

So I have gotten pickier about who I add to my various networks. And while I don’t want to be as snobby as that Jr. High clique of popular kids, I do think we all need to take a step back and consider what our friending – and more importantly defriending –policies will be going forward.

Over at Twitter (where my network is still “just” a few hundred followers), there is a lot of activity around third-party apps that will automatically increase your network with all sorts of tricks. This is a bad thing, because those networks become less valuable as their feeds become larger. You will be adding more noise to the signal, and as a result, miss out on the important stuff.

I am still figuring out Twitter, to say the least. But I can tell you that my Twitter activities have saved me a grand total of $140, which is the overdraft fee that Bank of America initially charged me when I deposited a check to the wrong account. Through the miracle of social networks, I was able to tweet my bank, email them the information and get them to call me and correct the problem, and probably keep me as a customer.

Now, I don’t have all the answers here. Or even some of them. And I am glad that I don’t have to deal with the hyper social strata that are Middle School today. But I can take some small comfort that none of my 20-something children have Twitter accounts, at least not yet.

If you are part of a business, sooner or later you want to be able to collaborate on a database with a colleague or customer. In the past, the easiest way to share a small database was to create a spreadsheet and email it to your collaborators. While this isn’t the best method, it has withstood more sophisticated competition.

I talk about why and ways that you can share spreadsheets and simple databases in this feature for PC World here.

One of the easiest ways to collaborate with a business partner or colleague is to e-mail a document to them, but it is also one of the hardest habits to break too. And while e-mail is so pervasive and nearly instantaneous, the notion of serial collaboration–I work on the document, send it to you and you work on it and send it back–is clumsy. The attached documents can clog up e-mail systems or get rejected by filters. If more than two people are working on it, someone has to be in charge of resolving conflicts.

There are better ways and I will show you a few alternatives in my column this week in PC World.