The Secret to Attracting Online Influence

If you want to attract influence online, it's actually quite simple. All you need to do is find or create cool stuff that other people with a shared passion will care about. The bigger that pool, the wider your influence can be - e.g. that's why those who track celebrity gossip, tech and/or sports often attract a larger following. They create or find cool stuff.

Here's are a few example of what I mean. All of these came right to my inbox this morning via my Posterous reader, which is helping me find new voices like Zee Kane ...

An amazing photo stream of Obama and world leaders where he maintains a consistent smile.

And also from Zee, a new iPhone camera app and awesome photos from Michael Jordan's college years.

The workspaces of the rich and famous, via Guy Kawasaki.

And also from Guy, why content trumps SEO.

Cool stuff that I care about from people I trust. Simple enough, right?

The Pitch: Alan Warms of Appolicious

Alan Warms, CEO of Appolicious, stopped by my office today to give me a rundown of his site - a social network for mobile apps. Right now it's just for iPhone apps, but they will be expanding soon to cover Android and Blackberry. For more see this short video. It's an interesting concept, although I would be eager to see them do more to connect to Facebook and to bring the social network to the iPhone - which is in the works.

Charticle: The Death of the Print Newspaper

The Mint blog has compiled in one place a wealth of data about the decline of the print newspaper. The data points come from the Newspaper Association of America and Bloomberg. 

Curiously the data doesn't include aggregate figures from Mint users - which conceivably they can compile by looking at payments to newspaper delivery companies and the like. It would have been interesting to see how this trend is sliced among Mint users, who are more tech savvy. 

The full size infographic is here. Highlights below via Mint.

Lifestreaming Lessons - a 90-Day Report

As many of you are aware, three months ago I did something that some considered virtual heresy. After five years and 5300 posts I shuttered my blog, Micro Persuasion, in favor of this lifestream. I set out to find a middle ground between a blog and a tweet. I longed for a new approach where I could post shorter items, more often and in more visual and creative ways. I wanted to establish a place where we could probe technology - like Da Vinci once did on his own - but do so together and daily. Posterous has done a great job on the tech side, but I want to elevate my game.

So far, I am extremely pleased with my approach, but I am never one to be satisfied. The basic formula is working well. I use this site as a launching pad to initiate many of my social streams and then I go and engage in conversations around these out in the hubs where it syndicated. Still, I am also posting content often directly into Facebook and Twitter without starting it here. I may play with the formula so that everything at least begins here.

So what's missing? Well, the content is still too text heavy. Posterous lets you do so many things with audio, video, photos and text. I keep a list of formats I want to try. However, I still resort back to text too often and, what's more, I haven't been able to post daily as I had hoped. I am close, but I can do better.

Last night on the Long Island Railroad I drew up this mindmap in Mindnode on my iPhone. I appreciate alliteration. How would you feel about a structure like this where I theme the content based on the day of the week? Monday we tackle models and/or mindmaps, Tuesday we talk trends, etc. I want to post more often and more creatively than just writing.

The Science of Retweet Success

Fascinating study by Dan Zarrella that looks at what does/does not get retweeted, based on 40M retweets. Unsurprisingly, words and time of day matter immensely. Surprisingly, begging works! Yet, semicolons don't!