The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Curating Twitter: Three Hand-Picked Must-Follows

Twitter is quickly evolving into a superb way to discover fascinating content you normally wouldn’t have, by following interesting people who tweet with great editorial curation. The key, of course, is exercising your own curatory judgment in identifying said interesting people. And since we’ve been in the business of sparing you unnecessary curatory work since 2006, here’s some help — 3 incredible Twitter personas on whom we have a massive, butterflies-in-the-brain culture-crush.

NICK BILTON

Nick Bilton may work at a pillar of traditional media — The New York Times, to be exact — but his interests are closer to what we like to call enlightened futurism: Cultural and technological innovation of the most compelling kind. You can count on him for a steady stream of fascination across technology, new-age publishing, media, data visualization and miscellaneous finds of cultural relevance.

Nick may tweet infrequently, but when he does, it’s quality stuff.

Stats:

  • Followers: 3,072
  • Following: 342
  • Tweets/day: 0.8
BBH LABS

Underwritten by Mel Exon and Ben Malbon, @BBHLabs is the Twitter outpost of — you guessed it — NY-and-London-based neo-agency BBH Labs.

These guys just “get it” — “it” being all the diverse incarnations of the business of ideas, from design to advertising to social media to interactive wizardry. Mostly, they seem to share our belief that the future of the marketing and advertising industry is not in the pushing of product but in the pulling of ideas — from innovators, from artists, from various cultural agents who pursue their own passions that may just so happen to make for great marketing.

You can count on @BBHLabs for a variety of creative explorations, but especially for bleeding-edge developments across data visualization and crowdsourcing.

Stats:

  • Followers: 2,888
  • Following: 802
  • Tweets/day: 3.6
CHRIS ANDERSON

If you’ve been reading Brain Pickings, you’re well familiar with TED and thus with Chris Anderson — TED’s brilliant curator but oh-so-much-more.

Unlike most people who tweet as the “public face” of a big organization or institution (sorry, @SamsungMobileUS), Chris goes well beyond simply promoting TED’s (already fascinating) content and actually walks the walk of what TED stands for — ideas worth spreading — sharing brilliant ones across all facets of culture: Design, art, sustainability, technology, social media, philanthropy and miscellaneous curiosity about the world.

Chris also writes The Untweetable — a roomier outpost for insight that can’t be contained in 140 characters. There, you’ll find anything from the continuation of compelling, heated Twitter discussions to bonus content beyond Twitter to original social media experiments.

He comes with our highest stamp of approval — a rare combination of superb editorial judgment, compelling cultural curiosity and, to use a TEDism, incredible moral imagination.

Stats:

  • Followers: 100,422
  • Following: 269
  • Tweets/day: 5.6


Published May 8, 2009

https://www.themarginalian.org/2009/05/08/best-of-twitter/

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