It also means that poor quality content gets hits and views whilst really good content can’t break through.

I think you can really see this on Digg. How many of the front page items are really poor? But they made it too the front page because of power users who have armys of friends who will digg their submissions without even reading the article.

Its a shame really, and something that I hope does not continue through the evolution of social media.

For those who care about this sort of thing, it will fast become obligatory to maintain two Twitter personas (as Brogan does): one for “media”, and one for the person. I hope I don’t have to bifurcate my personality like that, as I’ve barely got a handle on the one.

It would be more true, however, if we had a backwards-looking scorecard for those behaviors. Like the reports that show your mutual fund manager is actually an idiot – something that shows whether your retweet choices actually generate traffic or gain traction.

Something like a “Curation Contest”. Hmmmm.

I worry that the further we fragment into self-selected groups online, the less diversity of opinion and awareness of other voices we’ll have. For example, it becomes obvious when we talk about Twitter selection bias (just read your other post) that there’s a much larger division going on: Internet vs. non-Internet people.

Maybe some communities don’t have high-speed connections, laptops, or even the ability to read. Yet, in places like the rural deserts and villages here and abroad, there flourish an abundance of handed-down stories, generations-old. Philosophies not found in books or magazines or blogs.

These, like the pools of ideas in untapped islands of Twitter communities, are impossible to tap unless you GO there. It’s scary, makes us vulnerable, but then, we learn.

Probably too early to tell without some sort of statistical analysis!