Here is a table of the members’ net worth, sorted from richest to poorest. Since the data provides only range of net worth, I’ve sorted by the lowest estimated amount (sorting by the high estimate has only a marginal impact on the order, with Senator Kyl dropping several places).

Data from OpenSecrets.org

I should note that this is a rather blunt analysis. Due to different forms of taxation someone that has a higher net worth may or may not have to pay more taxes if there is a change to the tax regime. Additionally, this is net worth, which is not the same as annual income and is taxed differently.

As an aside, I plan to start a non-profit to help raise Senator Baucus out of his relative poverty.

Note: I removed about a dozen responses that stated ownership of more than 500 mobile phones. While this is probably feasible, it was a small minority and skewed my results too much.

Comments by User Gender While expecting a male bias, I didn’t expect it to be so one-sided. I’m interested to know if the page demographics are similarly skewed.	Comments by Locale Facebook doesn’t provide location for un-authenticated requests. Fortunately, locale is a useful proxy. (EN includes US and GB)
Comments by Sentiment This measures the sentiment toward HTC and their products, not the sentiment of the comment. The sentiment was reviewed manually, so the accuracy is quite high. However, the small sample-size should discourage reading too much into this set of results.

The process for this was actually quite straight-forward. First I used the Facebook Graph API to download all the comments into a database. Because I didn’t want to manually review 2000 comments, my first pass automatically checked for comments containing only numbers. This took only a few minutes to code and knocked out 400 comments.

I then selected very short messages with the assumption that they were just numerical answers with punctuation. This proved prescient since many people noted the number of phones they’d owned and appended smiley faces. This took care of another 250 or so messages. To review the final set, I coded a small web application to manually step through each comment. Through this application I could also note the comment sentiment, past and current phones, and other facets. After some refinement to the app, I was able to review about a dozen messages a minute and complete the entire review in less than two hours.

I looked at several other Facebook posts with a large number of comments, but choose this one because many of the answers would be uniquely easy to automatically parse. If the question required a prose response, the analysis would need to be done more manually, which would be quite time-consuming. Crowd sourcing could provide a solution, perhaps through something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Because I coded the web application solely for this topic, I was able to very specific in my search parameters, which allowed for some interesting insights. For example, it was fascinating to see people’s ownership history (especially how their brand-loyalty has evolved over time). Similar analysis using an off-the-shelf tool (Sysomos, Radian 6, etc) would not have provided this level of customization and granularity.

After mapping the best-networked DC Twitter technorati, I figured I’d try it out on an environment I’m not familiar with: Seattle.

The results

Here are the results of the best-networked Seattle tech Twitter users:

Shauna Causey, who manages social media at Nordstrom, ranks the highest, by quite a margin over second-placed Monica Guzman, a tech journalist. Unsurprisingly, Bill Gates, perhaps the world’s foremost geek (and I use that approvingly), ranks highly in third. Two broadcast journalists, Jenni Hogan and Linda Thomas, follow-up in forth and fifth. Kevin Urie, founder of Social Media Club Seattle, ranks sixth.

Rounding out the top ten are: Brian Crouch (7th), social media manager for the Music Group; Chris Pirillo (8th), a social media strategist; Jeff Shuey (9th), board member of the Seattle Social Media Club; and, finally, Lily Jang (10th), a local TV anchor.

For the methodology and additional information, check out the post I did on my DC analysis.

A few notes

• This analysis mapped 1910 individual Twitter accounts, resulting in 4.2 1.4 million relationships to crunch. Interestingly, this is fewer accounts than the DC analysis (2700 accounts), but more than twice as many relationships (1.9 million) Check out the update below.
• There were more local journalists in my Seattle results, likely due to the wider network of relationships indexed as compared to the DC analysis. I debated removing these accounts to focus just on people self-identified as involved in the tech scene, but I didn’t want to adjust the results too much.
• There were a good number of “institutional” Twitter accounts that I filtered out. Check out the complete list of results to see how they scored.
• It’s interesting to see how well Kevin Urie was ranked. Despite having a relatively small following, he was very well connected within this network, no doubt through his work with the Seattle SMC.
• Oh, and why Seattle? My girlfriend is working there and can help validate the results.

Know the Seattle tech scene well? How do my results look to you? Anyone I missed?

Seattle skyline photograph by Bala

After mulling this over, I figured a good measure of potential influence would be how well networked a person is in a particular topical environment. To test this hypothesis I decided to look at an area I know pretty well: the Washington DC tech scene. Since I already have a good sense of this community, I could verify the analytical results from my own knowledge.

The Results

After doing my analysis, here is my ranking of the top ten most networked individuals:

Overall, this squares pretty well with my knowledge of this community. Number one, @corbett3000, belongs to none other than Peter Corbett, the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a leading DC technology firm and organizer of many DC tech conferences (including the upcoming 10-day DC tech festival). Coming in second is Shana Glickfield, who goes by @dcconcierge, and is DC’s consummate networker and FOMO sufferer. Rounding out the top three is Frank Gruber, @frankgruber, CEO of TechCocktail.com. Number four is every one’s favorite Microsoft staffer, Mark Drapeau who tweets at @cheeky_geeky.

It is particularly interesting to see how a large Twitter following does not necessary translate into a significant number of relationships within this particular network.

For kicks, I threw the top forty accounts into NodeXL to see what the network looks like:

Network of the top forty DC Twitter technorati. Each line represents a single follower-followed relationship. It is interesting to see which accounts are more central within this small network and which are more peripheral.

Methodology

And the big question: how did I arrive at these results? Here is the process I used:

1. My starting point was trying to figure out how to measure the number of connections within a particular geographic region and subject area. For this, I needed a good index of who was active in the DC tech sphere on Twitter. Fortunately, this part of the job has been done by the community in the form of Twitter lists. I trolled through a large selection of Twitter lists looking for ones that had “DC” and either “social media” or “technology” and entered those info my database.
2. I then went through each list and saved all the individual accounts on that list.
3. From the users on these lists, I ended up with a database of about 2700 Twitter accounts that, through the Twitter lists, were related to the DC tech scene.
4. In the most time-consuming part of the analysis, I set-up a system to download all the people these Twitter accounts followed. Since a follow is an expression of interest in the followed account, I counted that as a “vote”. This is much the same way Google considers a link a vote of confidence in the linked page.
5. After a few days of downloading data from Twitter, I had a database of nearly 2 million follower-to-followed relationships. Using this index, I checked which accounts were most frequently followed and ranked them according.
6. I was able to automate nearly every set after selecting the Twitter lists, but the final step requires a good deal of “eyes on screen”. The final list included a number of very widely followed accounts, but not ones I was interested in. Since I was only focusing on individuals in DC, I removed a lot of institutions and people outside of the city. For example, the top three @mashable, @barackobama, and @techcrunch are all widely followed, but not members of the DC tech scene. As such, I excluded these from the final results. (It is interesting that Mashable has a much wider following in DC than Techcrunch. I imagine if I was looking at Silicon Valley the ranking would be inverted.)

I was able to automate most of the above steps using a small app I coded, so much of the data collection took place while I was fast asleep in bed. Due to Twitter API data call limits, most of this was done using automated CRON jobs. Steps 1 and 6 though were not automated and required diligently going through the data.

Final Thoughts

So that’s it? Certainly not, this only measures who is widely followed within this topical subset, not who is actually influential. You’d need to combine this with other measures (frequency of retweets, ability to drive conversations, and so on) to get real sense of influence.

Fortunately the results do square pretty well with my understanding of the DC tech scene, which helps validate the approach. Most likely I’ll do some more playing around with this technique, so stay tuned.

“It’s an honor to welcome the first american president that looks brazilian!! :)”

Those words of welcome, from Fred in Brasilia, joined about 30,000 more messages for President Obama as he made his first visit to Brazil this past March. To help celebrate the president’s visit, we helped the United States Embassy in Brasilia develop “Boas-vindas Presidente Obama”, a social media campaign to raise interest in the president’s visit.

A major objective of this program was to help Brazilians engage with the President’s visit beyond the handful of public events and the usual TV coverage. Brazil is a continent-sized nation with more than 190 million people, so the opportunities for Brazilians to actively participate were unfortunately limited. Social media provided a solution. ?The visit also provided an opportunity to increase mutual understanding and further dialogue with Brazilians on priority themes (such as education, the environment, clean energy, global partnerships, and other topics).

The concept was simple: create a campaign driven by social media where Brazilians could submit short welcome messages to President Obama. These were collected in two mediums: short text messages and 15 second videos recorded through the participant’s web cams. The text messages were gathered through a custom-built application we designed and developed within the State Department. On the video side, we turned to VideoGenie, a web start-up.

The welcome campaign micro-site.

Since the Brazilian social networking landscape is quite diverse, we utilized a wide variety of platforms to get the word out and to collect welcome messages. A key goal was to increase the size of US Embassy Brasilia’s communities on Facebook and Orkut pages. For Facebook we created an application housed within the fan page. This allowed us to integrate our Facebook efforts and direct Facebook advertising to both the fan page and application. Orkut doesn’t provide an application framework for their brand channel, so we created a microsite at www.obamabr.org. This also gave us added flexibility on the design and content that wasn’t feasible within Facebook.

We also integrated the various social sharing tools, primarily Facebook and Twitter buttons, to help encourage people to share the wider program, but also, importantly, the individual messages they recorded. This made it easier to track how many mentions we had on the various social networks.

The messages came in from all across Brazil, from small hamlets in the Amazon to the bustling metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. As Fred’s welcome suggests, Obama’s story resonates personally with many in Brazil’s diverse population of 190 million people. The program also demonstrated the warmth and hospitality of the Brazilian people. Indeed, many people invited Obama to their houses to join their families for dinner.

The welcome campaign Facebook application showing the live video feed of a press conference.

The Tech

My role was primarily as the design and development lead, with the help of our developer Jeff Hunter. I also provided strategy advice based on the past presidential trips I’ve supported.

In a single hectic week we developed and soft-launched the application, microsite, and a backend system to moderate the incoming messages. Throughout the next two weeks leading up to the visit we continually made improvements and added features, with a particular emphasis on bringing more people to the embassy’s Facebook page.

The site was coded in PHP using the brilliant PHP-framework CodeIgniter. Without a doubt we could not have launched as quickly as we did without the aid of this framework. When we started to get significant press coverage and traffic spiked, the built-in caching functionality of CodeIgniter was a server-saver.

A few stats

The fan base of the embassy page increased from about 2,300 to 21,800 at the end of the program, an increase of about 19,500. This increase was partly driven by Facebook advertising, but much of the growth was due to the welcome message campaign.

More than 32,000 welcome messages were received from dozens of cities and towns across Brazil. Of the collected messages, about 500 were videos, with the remainder text only. Following the visit, about 1,500 reactions to the visit were also collected. The Facebook application and microsite together received about 160,000 visits over the three weeks the program was live.

Daily totals of incoming messages from the 11th through the 23rd of March 2011.

The campaign also received significant media by prominent Brazilian outlets. Estadao, the second largest paper in Sao Paulo by subscribers, prominently featured an article about the campaign. The campaign was also featured by: Gizmodo Brazil, TV Globo’s G1 Political web site, R7 Noticias, and MacMagazine, and several others.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not thank the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and particularly the Information Resource Center. They really made this event happen. If you are interested in more events like this or to follow their work, I suggest checking out the Facebook pages for the U.S. Embassy Cairo and the Information Resource Center.

Faculty of Mass-Communications

Faculty of Economics and Political Science

Fortunately, I received a reminder of the importance of in-person public diplomacy earlier this week. As part of my trip across the Middle East, I gave many public presentations on how social media is used by the United States government in our public diplomacy efforts. I’d done this in the West Bank, Amman, and finally in Cairo.

Presentation to the Faculty of Media and Communication, Cairo University

This past Tuesday I spoke to the faculty and students of Cairo University’s Faculty of Mass-Communications and the Faculty of Economics and Political Science. Here is the presentation I used (PPTX). I can say, without a doubt, they asked some of the most challenging questions I’ve received about social media. Their interests were wide and varied. They asked about the risks that social media could detach us from our real-world lives, the use of these tools by the Egyptian government, the role of social media in the release of Iraq war documents on Wikileaks, and much more.

Opinions were also quite diverse. Several individuals asked pointed questions about U.S. government control of the media. As the recent mid-term elections and the ever-shifting popularity of American policies demonstrate, we operate in a very challenging media landscape in which we often have little power to control the message. As I noted in the discussion, if the U.S. government is so good at this, they wouldn’t need me!

A professor of the Faculty of Media and Communications

Conversely, the Wikileaks questions often focused on how the U.S. government is quite powerless to control even its own information. Unfortunately, since this isn’t an area I focus on I feel I wasn’t able to sufficiently address the questions. If you’re interested in the Wikileaks Iraq documents story the New York Times has a great special feature on the subject.

In addition to the challenging discussion, I was also very impressed with how Egyptians are using social media to improve their society. One project is using social media and online maps to combat sexual harassment. Another campaign uses these tools to help keep Alexandria clean, an effort that has gotten widespread media attention and compelled the local government to act. Others are using social media to create connections between ordinary Americans and Egyptians to correct stereotypes and improve relations.

The past three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity: events, interviews, chats over tea, seeing astonishing landscapes, experiencing remarkable history, and so much more. However, it is the friendships that were started that I find most important. And, naturally, we’ll be continuing these friendships over social media until my return!

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River

While the The Black Nile‘s subtitle boasts, “One Man’s Amazing Journey…”, a cliched line that probably should be forbidden from any future use, it is nonetheless quite accurate. Tracing the waters of the Nile from Uganda to Egypt, Morrison brings us on a journey not only across thousands of miles of Africa but also through a vast diversity of peoples and their rich and often troubled history. Weaving recent and historical events with the story of his own journey he provides an unique window onto a part of the world all too easily and often ignored. Furthermore, he casts light onto the diverse forces at play behind the conflicts that occasionally make headlines in Western newspapers. What many often portray in simplistic terms as strife between Christianity and Islam, Morrison exposes as complex and fluid allegiances and schisms. Often these are less about religious differences and more about the dynamics between the wealthy and poor, those in power and those outside, competing tribes and families, and other fault lines.

The book’s core however is really a travelogue, and it moves at a swift and compelling pace. The first half of the book focused largely on the interplay between Morrison and a long-time friend who has joined him on the first leg of the journey. During his recounting of their procession up the Nile he delves into their personal histories, the author’s work as a journalist stringer and his friend’s easy life working in a resort in the United States and frequent trips to the bottom of a bottle. Unable to get a visa into Sudan, and burnt-out from the oppressive heat and relentless insects, his friend leaves Morrison midway into the narrative. Once alone, Morrison spends more time examining the people he meets, the history of the places he visits, and on his own reactions to the situations he encounters.

The narration is occasionally gritty, making the rugged, unpredictable, and often sad lives of the people he meets tangible. Sometimes this tangibility is off-putting, reducing people to the mere the functions of their bodies. More often however the realism of the situation stands in contrast to these people’s humble perseverance. Simple dichotomies, between good and bad, friends and enemies are turned on their heads when presumed enemies are gracious and welcoming.

“Life in extremity is difficult to explain-things happen and people don’t know why they are happening. Some events were fortunate and others were disastrous and that’s how it went.”

There are no simple answers in the book. The alliances he examines are constantly reshaped and reevaluated. The landscape similarly is in constant flux, changed by logging, droughts, and streams of garbage. Massive dams threaten rich farmland and traditional ways of life, while bringing much needed electricity and development to impoverished towns and cities. This book raises questions, answers a few of them, and leaves a lasting impression.

Recently I had the pleasure to participate in the Public Media Camp, an unconference focused on strengthening local and national public broadcasting. A good portion of the discussion focused on the disruptive and new opportunities being presented by Internet-based dissemination and social media.

Of Hubs and Spokes

While the focus on social media related well to my work in public diplomacy, the very structure of public media actually seems quite similar to the hub and spoke model of the central State Department in Washington and the various embassies, consulates and missions scattered around the world. As with public broadcasting, content is produced and disseminated in Washington and the very diverse missions overseas. Just as NPR or PBS in Washington balances the needs of their direct national audience with the needs of their affiliate stations, the State Department also has to support an international audience for its America.gov properties while meeting overseas mission needs.

Additionally, most public media outlets focus more on informing audiences and social change than increasing profits. Public diplomacy has similar goals: changing perceptions about the United States’ and its policies and creating a better environment for U.S. goals, such as democratization, improving religious freedoms and so on. Without profits as a baseline metric, both organizations aim for more intangible goals, such as those elucidated above. This makes measurement more challenging, with related knock-on effects.

Measuring Impact

Fortunately, public media and affiliated organizations are taking on a number of these challenges, most especially measurement. The Fledgling Fund, an NGO focused on helping social change projects get off the ground, has done quite a bit of work figuring out how to measure such an amorphous goal as creating social impact. Drawing from their experience, they’ve created a five-stage model which helps measure social impact of a program.

Here are the steps (scroll down for a diagram):

1. Media quality: Most basically, this stage asks if the subject is a quality piece of media? Are the characters strong and well defined? Is the story well-toned? Will it get press attention, resonate with viewers, generate online buzz and so on?
2. Raising public awareness: Where is the topic in the public consciousness? Some topics don’t need more more widespread attention, so media focused solely on raising awareness isn’t necessary. However, some topics are not well known, so a basic introduction or media focused on moving beyond the choir may be necessary.
3. Increased public engagement: There is the largest leap in the five stages, moving from awareness to engagement. Essentially, this is the leap from passive attention (viewing a film, reading a web site) to active engagement (promoting the film to friends, commenting on a web site). Reaching this state indicates a change in attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.
4. Stronger social movement: At this stage, people have moved from low level engagement to greater collective action. If the media engaged the choir, then they’ve become more creative or effective after engaging with your media. If the media reached new audiences, then they’ve joined existing organizations or created their own to reach the goals elucidated in your media.
5. Social change: This is the ultimate goal and, often, the most difficult to reach. At this stage the media has encouraged policy or legislative change, a tangible shift in the public dialog on the topic or influential changes in citizen or consumer behavior.

This model seems to suit public diplomacy media efforts well, though it would require some time spent on teasing out the specific measures, qualitative and quantitative, for each step. The Fledgling Fund has a good whitepaper on the model (PDF) that delves much deeper while also providing some useful real-world case studies.

There were a few more gems from the public media camp that I hope to write-up in the next week or so.

False Economy, a new book by Financial Times writer Alan Beattie is both ambitious in its geographic and historical scope and quite reserved in drawing monumental judgments. Written for a the general reader, it is light on the economic theory and, when raised, explained clearly and succinctly.

The book’s basic treatise could be summarized thus: a nation’s economic fortunes rise or fall based on a wide variety of variables, typically due to domestic actions and often not those promoted by conventional wisdom. Over the course of the book, Beattie rejects many oft-blamed reasons for nations staying poor: religion, culture, natural resources and other such stalwarts. His reasoning is frequently compelling, rarely relying on abstract economic theory, instead elucidating his point through provocatively eye-opening examples.

Efficient Corruption?

Julius Nyerere, former Tanzanian president

Take corruption: as many non-profits and intergovernmental organizations (such as the World Bank and United Nations) argue, corruption is one of the main reasons why many counties fail to grow. While this is partly accurate, the complete truth is much more complicated. In an early chapter, Beattie asks why Tanzania remained poor under a scrupulously honest leader while Indonesia was relatively enriched under the notoriously corrupt Suharto regime. While he underscores how all corruption is a drain on an economy, he draws a distinction between different types of corruption and how the differences can have a considerable impact on how an economy functions. Although Suharto, a former general, was famously corrupt, he was able to solidify his government’s power across the country, ensuring that the corruption was relatively regularized and efficient. Put simply, you only had to bribe one official to get things moving forward. Coupled with a relatively free market, the corruption acted largely as a consistent tax on business.

In stark contrast, Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, was a former teacher and, by all accounts, an honest leader. He nonetheless presided over a largely collectivist economy permeated by corruption at all levels, ensuring each step forward required yet more pay-offs to corrupt officials. Eventually, each step became sufficiently painful that most people gave up and returned to a meager life of subsistence farming. In both cases, corruption was rife, but in only one example did corruption significantly stifle economic growth.

Other Myths of Development Theory

Beattie efficiently deals with other myths of development theory. If certain religions, as argued of late about Islam, are such barriers to growth (or, inversely, regularly cited as supportive of economic actively, such as Protestantism), why are there so many examples in history of rich Islamic nations and poor Protestant ones? In most cases, Beattie argues that it is necessary to look at the individual actors and the environment in which they are functioning to see the underlying reasons for economic growth or retardation. In one situation where religion (or culture, geography and so on) could be seen as an impediment, in another it may provide a competitive advantage, or, indeed, have little influence at all.

Critique

While each argument is cogent and feels well supported by president day or historical examples, False Economy nonetheless has two flaws. First, the globe-trotting, time-traveling choice of examples lends a certain disjointedness to the narrative. On one page, you could be introduced to such disparate individuals as Russian Tsars, corrupt Indonesian bureaucrats, Argentine plantation owners and English industrialists. The swiftness many of these subjects are raised, used for comparison and discarded can be dizzying and raises concerns that they’ve been cherry-picked from a world of alternative choices. Without greater exposition of each, or preexisting knowledge, the reader is forced to take such comparisons at face value.

The second criticism is that the book never really comes to a cohesive conclusion. While the subtitle of the book, “A Surprising Economic History of the World”, suggests a primary underlying narrative, there is little to tie the various constituent parts together. Each chapter feels only marginally connected to the others, tackling the ascribed subject but never drawing strong or consistent parallels between them (beyond the aforementioned caution against blindly following conventional economic wisdom). Indeed, the brief final chapter introduces another example, a short analysis of the WTO and failed Doha rounds, rather than providing any real conclusion. If anything, in this chapter Beattie acknowledges this lack of clarity, stating, “I don’t know what the exact answers are [to economic growth], but anyone who claims she does should not be trusted.” Stating this point earlier in the book perhaps could have dissipated the nagging question as to when Beattie was going to state his central thesis.

Verdict

Despite these two quite minor criticisms, False Economy is a compelling read, most especially for the numerous gems of insight scattered throughout. I’ve already mentioned a couple here, but there are others well worth highlighting. Below is one of my favorite.

The Danger of Populous Capital Cities

Pierre L’Enfant's original plan for Washington D.C.

For most of it’s history, Washington DC was a sleepy backwater, noted more for stifling heat than vibrant culture. Surprisingly, for a country that pioneered democratic governance, the District’s six hundred thousand residents lack voting representation in Congress, largely disenfranchising the city’s population in the federal government. Yet, is it possible that the District’s small population and disenfranchisement actually helped stabilize the greater country?

As Beattie points out, countries where the residents of a nation’s capital city hold disproportionate sway over the central government tend to be much more unstable. Through their votes, or more often mass protests, residents of the capital tend to skew national priorities toward the capital at the expense of the rest of the country. This encourages more people to move to the capital, further distorting the central governments priorities, and the feedback loop strengthens. Examples of this behavior litter history, from the destructive rent-seeking of ancient Rome to the back-and-forth mass protests of modern-day Bangkok. Beattie sums this tendency with the following statistic, “In countries with a history of stable democracy, an average of 23 percent of the urban population lives in the central city; in unstable dictatorships with a history of coups and revolutions, the figure is 37 percent.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, even autocrats are appreciating the potential benefits of removing a government from undue influence caused by a large population a the capital’s doorstep. Naypyidaw, the newly built capital of Burma, was specifically located outside the relative political ferment of Yangon. Beattie however doesn’t touch on how such moves by dictatorial regimes who use the same strategy to avoid (potentially legitimate) grievances.

Despite the benefits of limiting local influence on a national government, Beattie fortunately (at least for me, a District resident) suggests that the democratic tradition is sufficiently well rooted in the United States that Washingtonians should, finally, be given the vote.

There are plenty of other equally intriguing stories through the book, beyond those mentioned here, so I highly suggest reading False Economy. Don’t expect a well argued plan for economic development and you can sit back and enjoy many clever and unexpected examples from the pages of economic history.