I am running a little experiment on Twitter. I have created a new account called askTWIT. The purpose is to facilitate getting answers to questions by tapping into the Twitter hive-mind, by acting as a central point of reference where questioners and answerers can find each other. It works like this:
If you have a question:
1. Follow askTWIT.
2. tweet your question in reply to @askTWIT (eg. “@askTWIT Is Twitter useful or a waste of time?”)
3. watch for replies.
To answer a question:
1. Follow askTWIT.
2. Look for questions you might be able to answer.
3. Reply to the tweet with the answer (eg. “@azizhp yes it haz @Scobleizer duh iz useful”)
4. bask in the warm glow of Karma, Zen, etc.
If someone asks a good question it might develop a whole tree of responses which can be tracked on Quotably.
The idea somewhat borrows from Scoble’s idea of autofollowing everyone who followed him – his follow list is probably the closest to a hive mind as you will see on Twitter, but anyone with a few thousand followers will see a similar depth of knowledge in their crowd (problogger uses this to extreme advantage for all sorts of cool projects). Let’s see if this model for tapping the TwitterMind can scale.
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