Kevin Rose, aka Mr. Digg.com (which has been valued at anywhere between $0 and several hundred milion dollars), offers, in a guest post at TechCrunch, 10 tips for increasing your Twitter followers. Besides the fact that I’ve never seen Rose write a guest post, and that he left off the most important tip: be Kevin Rose, it’s a good read. But since only he can be Kevin Rose, you’ll have to make do with his 10 tips and hope you’ll get even a fraction of his nearly 90K Twitter followers. Oh by the way, he’s apparently an investor in Twitter. Did this happen before or after he sold his Twitter competitor, Pownce, to Six Apart?

If you’re just starting out with Twitter, it’s also worth checking out David Pogue’s article in the NY Times. He makes several interesting observations about the positive and negative behaviors on Twitter. He has also found that when he speaks at tech and edu conferences, he’s finding maybe 1 in 500 people are on Twitter.

It must depend on what circles you run in because, despite David Pogue’s experience, there are certainly enough Twitter users that there are plans for Twestivals (Twitter festivals) to raise money for charity. We’re not talking a few cities, we’re talking Twitter users from over 100 cities participating for 24 hours on Feb 12, 2009 in various fundraising events. If you want to hold an event, visit the Twestival website for details. All funds raised will go to Charity: water projects].

As a web worker, your web browser is one of your most important tools. It’s performance affects your entire day. If you’re using the Firefox browser and it’s acting sluggish, check out these speed-doubling tweaking tips from Boy Genius Report.

Another item in your web worker/ blogmaster toolkit is probably an HTML editor (especially if you’re blogging, too). When you get used to one editor for your blogging, it’s easy to think it’s your only option. Six Revisions lists nine source code/ WYSIWYG editors in their recent list of 30 useful open source apps for web designers. Of course, many of the apps in the list are great for bloggers and blogmasters too.

Not everyone agrees, but some types of websites need to be visually attractive to be impactful (though others get along just fine looking less so). Blog themes might be fine for, well, blogs, but if you have a newsy site with lots of content, you need something different. Everson News [via Blog Perfume] is a free magazine-y WP theme that is well-suited to sites with a high volume of fresh conent. The emphasis is on headlines, but there’s also a feature article image area, a video, and even a prominent banner ad area. It’s easy for readers to see what’s new, without having to scroll or scan through a lot of text to decide.

Whether you’re running a news site or not, if you want to have multiple authors each with their own blog(s) on your site, you need WPMU (WordPress Multi-User). It gives you the publishing framework you need, allowing for multiple blogs per author. Each blog within a single WPMU installation can have its own subdomain. E.g., blog01.mywpmu.com. Note that some web hosts have a restriction on how many subdomains your hosting account allows. Fortunately, subdomains in WPMU can be managed virtually, to circumvent any such restriction.

Now if you’re still in the beginning stages of building your first blog, check out this list of 29 tips, tutorials and resources from Problogger.

1. Saving You a AAA Membership
2. Getting First-Hand Reviews
3. Receiving Advanced Traffic Warnings
4. Making Travel Buddies
5. Getting the REAL Weather
6. Becoming a Super Stalker
7. Making New Gaming Friends
8. Receiving Better Customer Service
9. Becoming More Social

While it is a completely legitimate list, I doubt that the average Twitter user is going to get any of these uses out of it. (For example, I’ve honestly found far more social interaction on Plurk and Facebook with far fewer fans/ followers/ friends, in both cases, than on Twitter.) To benefit the way she’s suggesting, there are a few conditions:

1. You need to have a fairly large following. Even Maki of DoshDosh.com, who has a large Twitter following, has previously implied on Plurk.com that he sometimes gets little response to his Twitter polls. Maybe that’s not quite the same as merely asking a question, but it points out that if more people are not using Twitter in the above ways then it might be difficult for you to, if you’re not yet a popular Twitterer.
2. You need to be active on Twitter. It’s not the same as a web feed that people are subscribing to. A feed reader gives you the choice of a river of news (aggregation of headlines of all subscription feeds) or separate lists per site. Twitter gives you a single river.

So if you ask a question right now but your “best friend” on Twitter doesn’t sign in until two hours from now, they may never see your question. Retweeting your own tweet once in a while might be fine, but if you have to do it all the time, you’re probably going to lose all the people who follow you and are very active on Twitter. They’ll get tired of seeing the same thing over and over. (If you’re auto-updating your Facebook Wall status with your Twitter tweets, then you’ll also annoy your Facebook friends.)

The potential is there for Twitter to be very useful to a lot of people, but in its current state it suffers from the network effect. And since Twitter use means that everyone has to build their own network, Twitter is not valuable “out of the box.” It needs tweeks and mashups and special clients.

A number of the advanced Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck go a step further towards easier consumption of Twitter streams. However, there needs to be more customization features to really make Twitter as useful as suggested in the Mashable list above. The drawback is that Twitter can’t handle the server load, were someone to come with an “ultimate” Twitter client. Though us Twitter lovers are grateful for the service, there are still a number of improvements that Twitter needs to be even more useful. (So for now, a lot of bloggers, at least, are using Twitter to build blog traffic and the odd bit of socializing.)

Other Useful Twitter Uses and Hacks

If you want to use Twitter in more valuable ways, there are a number of options.

1. Thread tweets. For example, if you’re running a WordPress blog, you use FairyFish’s Thread Twitter plugin to organize related tweets in a threaded manner, similar to forums, some email clients and even some blog comments.
2. Microblogs. Check out ThinkVitamin’s tutorial on how you can create a multi-person microblog using Twitter, hashtags and Twitter RSS feeds. If the Twitter hashtag is being used properly, then all you’re doing is searching for instances of its use and pulling those tweets into your microblog. As ThinkVitamin points out, you can embed this micro-blog into any web page running PHP. You don’t need a blog platform.
3. Website integration. Nettuts discusses 10 ways to integrate Twitter into your website, including widgets, buttons, and more.
4. Other apps and services. Woork provides a list of over 30 Twitter services and apps that you might find interesting in making Twitter more useful to you.

Key Steps for Building Blog Traffic With Twitter

The first step, of course, is to sign up with Twitter, upload a picture or avatar, and fill out your profile. The profile allows you to link back to your website. [Note: plugins specifically mentioned and/or linked to below are for the WordPress blogging platform.]

1. Build your Twitter following. Add people who add you. Add movers and shakers. Add people who have a tendency to add back, if you follow them. (Compare the number of people they’re following with the number that are following them. These should be “close” in number.) To auto-follow, use a web service such as Tweetlater.
   
2. Post frequently on your blog. Not just indepth posts but also short bits for variety. Regular posting alone can increase your traffic, especially to a new blog. If you combine it with regular use of Twitter, this can generate even more traffic.
3. Display your latest tweets on your blog, either using a plugin or some custom code.
4. Display a “follow me on Twitter” button on your blog. This draws in your current readership. (Some bloggers are reporting higher Twitter followers compared to blog subscribers.)
5. Tweet your blog posts. In addition to sharing other web pages on Twitter, share your blog posts. This can be done manually, or you can install a plugin to auto-tweet a new headline (and link) to your Twitter stream.
6. Install a “tweet this” button on your blog, to be displayed on each of your posts. This lets your blog readers share the posts they enjoy, in their Twitter stream.
7. Retweet your post. Retweet the same post a couple of times in the same day, to ensure that more people see it. Make sure that you aren’t only tweeting your links, or links in general. If your entire Twitter stream is only links, people might start unfollowing you. Use Twitter the same way you might use your Facebook Wall’s status message: to say what you’re up to right now, or will be up to, announce events, share information, ask questions.

Keep tweeting and building your following. The more people in your network(s), the more likely a link will get retweeted.

Side note: Are you worried about having too many browser tabs open? If you’re using WordPress for your blog, you can use the Twitter Tools WP plugin to tweet from your blog’s sidebar. (Twitter Tools requires you have at least WP 2.3.) If you just want the ability to let your readers share your blog posts on Twitter, you can use Richard Thripp’s Tweet This WP plugin, which runs in older versions of WP as well new ones.