But thank you. And you are a phenomenal filter.

I will always blindly retweet Twitter employees and official Twitter Inc accounts.
If I’m mobile, but know an author + subject are time sensitive,
I’ll retweet for the benefit of my followers, even if I can’t open the page on my BB right then.

I recently answered an imaginary question on Twitter, that went like this: “Ed, how could you retweet and encourage @Webby2001 new thing, if you haven’t had time to really use it yet”?
I answered myself “That’s what a top Trust Agent gets as a reward for outstanding reliability and integrity”.
Does that mean a Tom Webster, Chris Brogan, Evan Williams can’t put out a faulty link or their own flawed report/software/opinion? No, we’re all human.

But there are a lot of times I can either share something right then without extensive research, or never.
And I know that my followers are big boys and girls with their own minds. Still, I strive to be the best filter on all of Twitter.

If i’m in transit and on my blackberry, I tend to retweet without reading the article only if I know the original tweeter and the subject line sounds interesting. Then I also favourite it, and read it when I’m back on the computer.

Matt cuts to the quick by asking how – or even why – one would want to measure “blind retweets.” Retweets are being used as proxies for all sorts of “metrics” by folks like Klout, Tweetlevel, Twitter Grader and scores of other services attempting to estimate influence and trust by mining unstructured data and forcing it through arbitrary algorithms. All you really have to ask yourself about the “blind retweet” is this: do you think it means anything different from a “considered” retweet?

If you do, then the question is begged: if discerning the difference between a blind retweet and a considered retweet is an intractable problem, and you agree that there is such a difference, then what can you conclude about these various automated Twitter influence/trust measures beyond their ability to calculate simple reach?

Admiral Ackbar, of course, has the answer.

Your point about authenticity and trust is very valid, and underscores another reason I don’t blindly tweet anything without clicking: even the “best” of the best RT bad links, via automated RTs of people they trust. Sure a bad link happens, but I see it every week: a so-called leader tweets something, a few people almost immediately RT it.. and the link’s bad.

Matt’s point about how and why you measure the blind RT stats is valid. As to whether or not you actually clicked the link, being quantitatively or qualitatively different: if the link works, I think it matters what you’ve done to the tweet, the link.

Are you just RT, hitting the Twitter button, or like Eric (or myself) adding something to the original content that you share with your followers? I don’t think you’ve made the link any different, but perhaps the tweet. FWIW.

Personally, I don’t really understand the point in a blind retweet – one where you don’t add your 4 pennies. I guess a RT w/o any additionally commentary is just an implied “I agree” right?

To answer your question,

“Is a retweet of a link I did click on qualitatively or quantitatively different than a retweet of a link I didn’t click on?”

The short answer is yes a link has more qualitative value if you clicked on it first – even more if you added your thoughts & they were positive. Quantitatively, I’m not so sure. If you are just trying to get more eyeballs/clicks, then sure, it has some value. However, personally, I ignore most RT’s that don’t have added commentary.

I’m confusing myself now.

OUT.

DJ Waldow
@djwaldow

I also manage the twitter and Facebook accounts for my employer and am extremely careful to make sure that whatever links I post come from sound sources and are compatible with our mission as a non-profit health care organization.

Fine, so we’ve increased reach, which counts for something. But then we end up right back at your original question. Because if something is not read, then the reach of the communication was irrelevant. (we’re only talking about links here, if we were talking about a brand message in the tweet itself for instance then that would be different)

So without knowing a rough corollary to an email clickthrough how can we really assign a degree of *influence* to someones calculated *reach*?

Other than detecting those trying to game the system however I’m not sure the effort required to try and make this determination for the purpose of influence would be that worthwhile.

But you raise a good point about the quality of retweets. Unfortunately, without reviewing a person’s browser history when retweets are sent, I don’t see any way to determine whether they were read/clicked.