Dan Zarella has a great blog post from last year which examines where the highest click-through rate for a URL in a tweet is, depending on where the URL was placed. Surprisingly, he found that links placed one quarter along the length of the tweet actually had the highest clickthrough rate.

This led to a lot of discussion around how tweet should be constructed, and whether we should be more commonly using something like “Headline / Link / Info”, rather than the more conversational “Headlne / Info / Link” model.

Dan’s heat map of clickthroughs

This puzzled me at first, because I couldn’t I couldn’t think of any examples of anyone ever placed a link in the middle of a tweet.

But then I began to think about the old-school retweet and recommendation – where you retweet content, but add a personal recommendation on the end of it. The more commonplace model for this is “Headline / Link / Personal Comment”.

A recommendation-style tweet from the rad Danielle Warby.

 I began to wonder if in the original data used in Zarella’s study, we would be able to see see whether a lot of the tweets involved retweets or links where personalised recommendations are added?

If this is the case, I think this really cements the power of social recommendation: irrespective of someone’s  reach or influence, this data clearly shows that someone personally recommending something is far more effective in creating clickthroughs, than simply by sharing a link. Brand advocates, from a marketing perspective, have a very important role to play in the way that new people approach or see a brand for the first time.

However, in the context of our decentralised media environment, I believe that it’s this structure of personal recommendations is also very important. I think it could be taking the first steps in addressing the challenge of ‘how does quality content rise to the top?’: because people actually talk about it, not just share it.

I suspect if we experimented with a “tweet this article” combined with “what did you really love about it” would see a significant increase in page views and traffice over a simple “tweet this” model. Only content which people really love will they add the extra effort to personally recommend to their friends.

Our media landscape is changing – but so is the way were finding and recommending what is the best content. We should keep an eye on how people are finding the best content as the mediums we use change: because this could be the centre point of how our media is found and consumed in years to come.

When I was sixteen years old, I wanted to code.

It was that time of year where we chose our year 12 subjects, which would, of course, we were told, define the rest of our lives. I wanted to code, but that involved joining Computer Studies. Our computer studies class was full of those socially awkward boys who could only converse with you about Pokebattles or, on a good day, something more pop-culture centric like The Simpsons. I would have been the only girl in the class, and, more importantly, at 16, none of my friends were doing it. On top of this, I had no idea what careers I could get into outside becoming a programmer: which was something I could barely comprehend in a world pre-MySpace. In fact, most people expected me to become an English teacher. I didn’t know what I wanted to do – but I knew I would be safe in the arts. And, honestly, I didn’t think that I was smart enough to code – so I scratched that secret craving off my to-do list. So I took Society and Culture.

In a small country town, with all my friend on farms, I’d taught myself HTML from websites online, because the only other thing to do was cultivate weed, and gardening was never really my style. I didn’t know anyone else who build websites and a hobby so it kind of fell into the ether as something I did sometimes to relax (like beating that level of Angry Birds that has had you stumped for hours). It was the challenge to create this thing that was in your head into the real world. It, of course, never occurred to me that I was probably doing the exact same thing that those socially awkward kids in Computer Studies were doing.

At the time, I didn’t think it was really acceptable for girls to code. I know it was all “pro gender equality” and all that, but when you’re a teenager, no one really paid attention, especially when then most important thing your friends were concerned about was the dress they were wearing for their deb ball. Its been only a few years on where I’ve realized that, actually, girls can code – and no one cares if a girl wants to code. I’ve discovered that people actually really like a girl who can code – because there isn’t as much as a language barrier as compared with boys who chose to sink into a code-centric world, who discuss the universe is references to Skyrim or, if we’re lucky, The Simpsons.

I’d dabbled in code on and off for a few years , but never really knew how to get back into it – to learn more coding languages that meant I could play with the web 2.0 world. I want to create mashups with twitterbots and google maps and haul information from across the web to create new ways to connect ideas – but I don’t even know where to start. To counter the dusty, unopened l javascript textbooks on my bedroom floor, I’d briefly considered doing a TAFE course on web mashups – but that’s a pretty huge commitment. It only occurred to me how long it’s something I’ve been craving to do when @mikey_pants tweeted: “new years’s resolution to learn to code? Sign up now to free weekly courses.”

It was like Christmas. I was so excited. I signed up and I’ve been working through the Codecademy courses like there’s no tomorrow. It’s been incredibly empowering. I can’t wait to fumble though the lessons and write my own code beginning with the dorky “hello world”. As for where to go from here – I don’t know. Maybe I have a base understanding to crack open my textbooks. Or maybe I’ll need to learn another language or two. I guess time will tell – either way, I can’t keep limiting myself from doing something I really enjoy simply because of something that, as a teen, I thought I couldn’t, or shouldn’t, do.

If you have any tips for rad sites to teach programming, hook us up. I’d love to know what else out there.

I came across* this excellent lecture by Jill Vaughan and Lauren Gawne from the Australian Linguistics Society annual conference 2011, looking at framing the construction of language around lolspeak.

I began to wonder whether this could lead to a linguistic divide between those who speak lolspeak, and those who don’t, mirroring the digital divide which we can see in Australian society, with the poorer of less computer-literate groups of society falling behind.

Every generation has it’s slang, but this is the first generation where one form of slang has created it’s own language structure, which is written, and in turn, formalized for that group who use it. In fact, there are kids who could have been raised being exposed more to lolspeak than traditional English.

I think there is already a shift in which younger generations struggle to be as traditionally grammatically-sound as older generations, which may be due to a combination of shifting standards in education systems, combined with leisure activities which don’t necessarily rely on the written word. Will lolspeak become a language which is adopted more naturally by the iGeneration? Will this cause a barrier to communication with older generations? I think it already is on the microscale in families, but probably not on a macroscale.

But then again, the media will taunt us with the fear that young people’s vocabulary is being drastically stunted by electronic mediums (where a teenager of 16 should know 40,000 words, and, instead, only knows 800.) So maybe teens will just throw the towel in and stick with the language they know. Long live Ceiling Cat!

What do you think?

I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak

I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak from Lauren Gawne on Vimeo.

* Hat tip to the rad Kate Fenerty for the link to this!