Sometimes I don’t follow my RSS feeds for a month or more. Mostly because it’s hard to try and digest all the worlds information every day and if it’s really important I’m sure I’ll catch wind of the news somehow.

Today I opened my RSS reader (Vienna for osX) and clicked on a post in Occam’s Razor (Avinash Kaushik’s blog). He was updating readers on the success of his book after being on the shelves for 8 months. He also included pictures received from fans holding the book and the various language translations.

He re-posted the picture I had taken of my analytics notebook while I was studying in a Bay Area coffee shop. The day I had taken these notes I made a Twitter post and “@ replied” Avinash. That’s how he ran across my picture.  After my pic, Avinash left some thoughts on our lunch meeting and what it meant to him to see my 40 pages of notes. It was pretty cool to see him publish my picture alongside so many other people who have found immense value in the pages of his (1st) book.

If you have any interest at all in improving your web analytic’s expertise, or at the very least want more control when it comes to data-driven decision making, you need to read Avinash’s blog.

…and make sure to take notes!

I ran across Twitter Grader the other day and noticed a lot of people bragging about their overall scores as compared to others. After looking at a few Grade Reports for various high profile tweeters, I came to a simple conclusion: a Tweeter’s high score doesn’t mean that their tweets actually contain ‘quality’ information.

Though I suppose the definition of what I consider ‘quality’ could be challenged here… The biggest thing I noticed was the Tweet Cloud at the bottom of Grade Report and what it said about the tone of the twitter user.

If the largest words in your Tweet Cloud are anything like LanceArmstrong’s, you’re probably conveying a pretty positive and overall congruent feeling with what you would hope to find in his daily activities. At the time of posting, Lance Armstrong’s Tweet Cloud includes: Kids, Ride, Good, Riding, Dinner, New. All of these terms are arguably great things to have pop-out. If his Tweet Cloud was filled with curse words, negativity or subject keywords the reader isn’t interested in, they might reconsider their choice to follow him.

Going forward I intend to use the Tweet Cloud as one of my metrics for measuring my ‘tweet quality.’ Hopefully this will help me gauge the tone of my “140 character internet voice.”

Of course, I’ll have to monitor the rate at which I’m gaining new followers—and losing them—to understand whether my tone is connecting with people or not. That’s something to be saved for another post.

What does your Tweet Cloud say about you?