Two interesting things stand out for me, 1) This post is less malicious then tickling a puddycat and is clearly a clever ploy to attract some attention, which is by no means a bad thing (or are their some thinly veiled frustrations hidden Saul? ) , 2) It presents a very interesting experiment as to whether the one provoked will respond quickly.

And yes .. he did. In fact he muti'd it himself within a couple hours.

This had me thinking .. let's say you wanted to get hold of some lofty techy type celeb, fairly ensconced in the web, can this be a more effective means of communication than email? Email is so nasty nowadays, what with spam and the amount of it, that it has become a fairly ineffective medium through witch to get hold of the cognoscenti (eliciting that *damned spammer* response is easier than one might think) whereas a post on a blog or twitter referencing one name seems to not carry that same problem (perhaps the cognitive filters are differently applied, reading a blog post at ones one accord is different from having an email shoved upon oneself afterall).

As I'm writing this though I release that I have read these exact same thoughts somewhere else before, and I have found it. In July Doc Searls responded on a similar call via a blog by Rohit Bhargava.
Rohit has also seen and acknowledged this trend and his even coined it, "Egommunication".

Ego Searches, also called Vanity Searches. Shallow or Human Nature? We like to know what people are saying, good or bad (we hope more good). We don't like to feel people are talking behind our backs, but we don't like getting sold to. Is this an opportunity for gold diggers and spammers employing clever tricks to have us view their wares? Perhaps.

To tack onto this idea I would like to add another observation, take a look at the number of comments at the end of Saul's piece, normally he garners somewhere between null and two comments on a piece, this one had 9 comments at the time of writing this. What does this tell us? Link baiting works, lol. No but more importantly, people track themselves and those that they feel close, or involved with. Basically Rafiq's groupies and enemies where also checking in. Thus sending out a certain proposition to a certain person might get you in contact with others with a similar interest around there, perhaps even a competitor in the space you never may have known about.

What's your take on this? As a developer I have to ask, is there a place for a tool here? I reckon so, I wouldn't mind a tool where I can slot in my name and have it feed me an RSS feed of new items found out there on the web, Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, Blogs, Web Searches wherever. Call it a vanity aggregator, perhaps one already exists? The idea of the Vanity Folder is not a new one.

Stii then wrote on his that perhaps we (bloggers) are getting lazy and that perhaps Twitter is working for us cause we have short attention spans.

Here's my 2 cents.

Yes, traffic is moving from blogs to twitter. Thank god for that. Now, let me tell you why I am relieved before you people have a heart attack.

Reason 1: Most blogs have become rubbish. We are all guilty of this, but if I'm honest then when I come to your blog or open your feed then don't want to know what you had for dinner, or how your mug of coffee kicks ar*e, or how you have a toothache. I certainly don't want to see every bloody braindump you have throughout the day or have to click on 17 "this is so cool" links. Seriously.

Reason 2: Tweets can and should be short. I can take 140 chars no more.

Reason 3: Blogs are forever, put stuff there you want to perserve, the really important stuff.

Reason 4: Twitter is transient, if it gets to noisy I just ignore it, I don't really care. I hope I am not missing anything important, rather put that on your blog!

I hope what this means is that the noise will shift away from the blogs and onto the micro-b's (*cute shortening of microblogs) and that the blogosphere will reclaim some of the shining beauty it once had, that place where I did not want to miss a single post on YOUR feed.

I then wonder where that leaves us at the end of the day? In the small markets where I am charged to deploy new technologies for consumption by the people of that region it poses an interesting problem gaining traction. Providing a typical blogging platform can be quite challenging to gain traction, because traditionally our audience has not had a voice as such, and its taking them a while to get used to actually having it.

I guess what I am trying to say is how do you get your audience to get excited. Over the next few days I plan on coming up with a few ideas, discussing the enablers and disablers to solving the problem.