Help me with my math

We all know the financial markets are crazy, but if you want proof even serious investors can be distracted by shiny objects, try this on for size.

Smart Money magazine reported this month that Twitter's $8 billion valuation means each of the 51 billion Tweets you and I and everyone else send annually is worth 16 cents. Seriously? My Tweets are genius, but I wouldn't pay 16 cents for them. That 16 cents should make every serious investor stop and take notice and stay far away from any IPO until Twitter shows signs it can earn consistent and sizable revenue. For those who don't know, the company is losing millions of dollars, and has since it launched and is still struggling to find any sizable revenue stream to pay its enormous serving costs, let alone investors. An IPO is simply a way to get others to pay for the party.

Then The Wall Street Journal reports that Tumblr is on the verge of raising up to $100 million in outside investment, giving the blogging company a value of $800 million. This for a company that, while very cool and growing in popularity, generates almost no revenue and has no clear concept of how to make money.

Hmmm ... reminds me of Pets.com, a flash-in-the-pan company whose business strategy was to lose money on every sale.

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My own Twitter "newspaper"

I stumbled across a new site called paper.li that allows anyone to create a "newspaper-style" digital publication from a variety of Twitter feeds. The process takes a few minutes, and offers some interesting prospects.

The tools are in alpha, so things are raw and can change at a moMy customized paper.li "newspaper"ment's notice, so my descriptions are based on what I did today.

There are three options for your publication by:
1) Pulling your feed plus those of the people you follow.
2) Pulling a feed from a designated #hashtag
3) Pulling a feed from a Twitter list

I created two: "The Logan Molen Daily" based on my @lmolen handle and the 253 people I follow and "The journoinnovation Daily," based on Steve Buttry's @journoinnovation list, which pulls in my Tweets.

The paper.li "pagination" process takes a few minutes and creates a publication pulling in posts sorted by topic categories.

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Do we really need a book on Twitter? ... Actually it's a good read

I stumbled upon a book called simply “The Twitter Book” at the Kern County Library, and kinda winced. A Twitter book? Seriously?

I picked it up and saw that the respected Tim O’Reilly was one of the two authors, so took a deep breath and opened it up.

It's actually good stuff.

The Twitter Book is a breezy read with lots of great tipsThe book -- slightly larger than pocket-sized -- is a breezy read with visual examples on the left page and tips on the right, for 230+ pages. Not saying seasoned Tweeters need to buy it, but it’s worth checking out from the library.

(Safari Books offers a free sample of the first chapter, but that chapter really doesn't capture the value of the bullet point tips and examples).

For me, I’ve been using Twitter since shortly after it launched, althoPages alternate between visual examples on the left and tips and detail on the right-hand page. This page isn't representative of most pages, which are full of bullet items.ugh sporadically at times. I’m by no means a power user and found some of these tips valuable.

Here are some highlights I found interesting:

• Twitturly and Tweetmeme capture and rank urls being posted in Twitter.
• The Favorites feature on Twitter.com, which for some reason I’ve never used, allows you to bookmark good stuff to read later (will be of great help to me, because I tend to read Tweets in spurts, which results in me opening up interesting links in multiple windows, which start eating up processing power if I don’t read them quickly enough).
• Mr. Tweet and Who Should I Follow? analyze your Twitter activity and network, and ID others you might be interested in following.
• Retweeting, or reposting other Tweets, is a sign of worthiness and value in the Twittersphere. Retweetist and Retweet Radar are sites that collect the most-retweeted posts.
• Twittersheep shows what your followers are interested in.
• This is a Twittersheep tag cloud of my Twitter followers' interests.You can preschedule postings at Tweetlater.
• Automating posting of some Tweets onto your Facebook page makes sense. But, c’mon, do you want every Tweet on Facebook. Facebook has an app that allows you to pick and choose which Tweets to resend along to your Facebook faithful.
• Create mini-bios on profile pages if you have multiple people posting to a single Twitter address.
• The authors cited @Comcastcares as the benchmark for using Twitter for customer service.
• “@replies are usually seen only by people following both parties to the conversation. So if you want your reply to be seen by all your followers, don’t put the @ at the begging of the tweet.” 
• If you’re a business, post personal updates to reveal the human side of your organization. Don’t just push official company messages.
• Twist (apparently now known as Trendistic) is among business apps that provide insight onto gauging the popularity of one Twitter topic over another (their example was “American Idol” vs. “Lost”).

Finally, loved the acknowledgements page, which listed people by Twitter address. Cool.

As you might expect, the authors are continuing the conversation on Twitter at #TwitterBook. I also encourage you to follow the authors @timoreilly and @sarahm's @TweetReport.