You may have noticed that on January 18, Wikipedia and Reddit went dark and Google displayed a black rectangle over its normally colorful logo. These Internet giants—as well as hundreds of thousands of smaller sites—were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill in the Senate: the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

The first true digital protest was surprisingly effective. If social networks and search engines are good at one thing, it is reaching a lot of people quickly. On Wednesday, 7 million people signed Google’s anti-SOPA petition, 126 million people saw Wikipedia’s blackout page, and 8 million used the page to look up contact information for their representatives. It was almost impossible to use the consumer Internet on Wednesday without coming across something about this legislation.

Apparently Congress listened. Between Wednesday and Thursday, 15 members of Congress dropped their support for the bills, and 70 members went from undecided to opposed. Just hours after the protests ended, both bills were dropped from the Congressional voting schedule. Now, both lack the support to be considered again.

For now…SOPA is dead and buried. If lobbying were a beer pong game, Hollywood executives would be running a naked marathon around Silicon Valley.

The Internet got what it wanted, but the conversation is not over. It is worth reflecting on SOPA and PIPA for two reasons: 1) to understand why they are perhaps the worst pieces of legislation ever written, and 2) to understand why we sort of need something similar. Stay with me.

Let’s tackle point #1 first. SOPA, as written, would have destroyed the Internet. To tackle the widespread issue of digital piracy, we needed tweezers—not the sledgehammer that was introduced on the House floor. Either the person who wrote SOPA had a painfully vague understanding of what the Internet is, or he hated it and wanted to kill it. Probably both.

The bill as written would have allowed the Justice Department to remove any website that displayed copy-written materials from the domain name registry, without due process. There are two things wrong with this. First, the punishment mechanism is silly. To be clear, removing a website from the domain name registry will not stop people from accessing it. It will, however, make accessing it needlessly difficult. If Google were removed from the domain name registry by this law, a user would have to type in one of Google’s IP addresses (for example http://74.125.224.72/) in order to access the site. This means that the URL “Google.com” would take you nowhere, but “Google.com” would still be around. Clearly the person who designed this punishment was confused.

Second, SOPA’s punishment criteria are extraordinarily broad. Punishing websites for hosting copy-written materials would mean that websites who allow people to post things would have to start policing their users. Or—in a more likely scenario under SOPA—websites would have to stop letting users contribute content.

Think of a website. Seriously, think of a website. Got one? Good. Were you thinking of YouTube, Facebook, Google, E-bay, Amazon, Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, any blog, any porn site, or literally any website with an upload button or a comment box? That site would have three choices under SOPA: 1) try to stop it’s users from posting copy-written material at great cost, 2) face legal action from the government, or 3) stop letting their users from posting anything at all. In the best-case scenario, the Internet would change dramatically to skirt around this law. In the worst-case scenario, the Internet would become completely useless. Email? Good luck.

Imagine a law that forced Toyota to choose between policing drunk drivers and removing all the doors from its cars before selling them. This is the choice SOPA would give to Internet firms. Toyota would probably stop selling cars. Facebook would likely be a shell of its former self. Find me a modern law that is written more poorly than SOPA. I will be flabbergasted.

However—and this is a big however—it is important to understand that the original spirit of SOPA was a good one. Online piracy is a serious issue that requires a serious solution.

Technologies such as torrenting (which was sort of invented by a CMCer) have made it easier than ever to steal content (aka digital music, software, and books). Widespread theft has become a significant issue for the creators of content. By almost any estimate, we have swapped billions of dollars worth of content with each other. It does not seem like we are going to stop on our own.

Let’s use some of our Econ 50 knowledge for a moment. If the creators of content cannot get paid for their work, many will be forced to stop creating content (or only the wealthiest will be able to continue to create). If people are asking for payment in return from their work—and we are not giving it to them—everyone loses. Do not get me wrong; it is wonderful when people do things for free. Wikipedia rocks. But we cannot rely on the spare time of the smart and creative to fulfill our desire for good writing, software, television and music. If we try, we will end up with crap. A culture of theft will eventually lead to a culture filled with things that are worthless.

Ending Internet piracy is a noble goal, and one that should be taken seriously by the government. Not to say I wasn’t raging with you, but the piracy party must end. We really ought to be paying people for their work.

The shutdown of MegaUpload by the FBI on Thursday was justified. The site was willfully providing a way for people to steal content. Their intent was to steal. Therefore, in our society, they should be charged with breaking the law. I may not agree with the way the shutdown was handled, but it is time to realize that we can’t expect to be able to take what we want. The laws of our society have to apply to the digital space just as they do in the physical space.

Yes, it is true: the digital space we are creating is much different than the physical space we were born into. It has very different properties. For instance, you can copy something an infinite number of times for almost no cost. Our capabilities inside the digital space are much, much different than we are used to; even those inventing our capabilities still do not understand them or can predict what they will be.

Because of these issues, our values and laws have to be applied differently to the digital space. However, one thing is for sure: a system of laws must be created for the Internet. Users today are making questionable choices that clearly contradict our system of values. There are parts of the Web that resemble the Wild Wild West or Hobbes’ state of nature. It’s time to address Internet crime with legislation. That legislation, however, must be written by someone knowledgeable of the Internet and its purpose.

Writing laws for the Internet will be one of the great challenges of our time. I only hope we can do it before the 60-year-old technophobes in Congress pass something like SOPA.

In the last few days, I’ve used a mobile search engine to resolve a number of factual disagreements. One friend assumed that the GDP of China had exceeded that of the United States (nope), I called out my dad for turning right on a red arrow (as it turns out, this is legal in Washington State) and I lost a game of chess because my opponent got his pawn to the end of the board and gave himself a second queen (chess sucks).

Win or lose the arguments, I ended them with my fingers.

Five years ago these debates might have continued until we found a computer. Twenty years ago they could have lasted until we went to the library. But the vast majority of these arguments of the past fizzled out into “we’ll never know” or “let’s stop talking about this” or “hey a**hole, you can’t have two queens.” Today, I can quickly sift through a vast collection of information to find the answer, simply by reaching into my pocket.

This is not a passing trend. If CMC is anything like the outside world, there will be more networked devices on campus this year than last year. These devices will be more powerful than before, and cheaper too. Together we will create more data (this article is on the Internet!), and accessing and sorting that data will be faster and easier (Bing it!)

Not to get too “out there” on you, but we are on a path to the point at which accessing online data takes as much time as accessing it from our own memory. When we get there, the time you spent memorizing the periodic table in high school will be one-hundred-percent worthless—even for you, chemists.

We need to change how we do things.

First of all, don’t worry about learning facts. What is the atom structure of methane? Who is the chair of Pomona’s Lit department? How do I get to Los Angeles? Learning the answer to these types of questions was incredibly valuable in the past. When learning simple knowledge was hard, memorizing facts could give someone a huge advantage. Those with huge stores of facts in their brains could easily access that data and apply it to the situations they faced. Today, a critical mass of CMC students can learn the answers to these questions while in Collins, on their way to meet the chair of the Pomona Lit department or while their friend is driving to Los Angeles. Putting this type of information in your brain is increasingly useless. Stop doing it.

Instead, learn skills. Knowing when you need to seek out more information, where to find it, how to analyze it and how to explain it—these are the things that matter in today’s world. The same goes for the ability to play an instrument, write a compelling argument, and study for exams. These are skills. Probably most of what you do academically at CMC is learning this type of complex knowledge. Keep doing it! If you value your education and your time, take classes that emphasize learning new skills over memorization.

Hopefully taking some time to think about your relationship with information will help you spend your time more wisely. But students are not the only ones who need to adapt. Our professors do too.

This is an entrance exam to Harvard from the late 1800s. Without the Internet handy, this test would destroy me. Why? Because I have not spent any time learning how specific words translate into Latin or where rivers of the world originate. Having that information in my brain is close to worthless because I can learn it at a given moment with a few thumb flicks.

In the 1800s, Harvard University thought having this knowledge mattered. In 2012, Claremont McKenna College must realize that it matters much less and perhaps, doesn’t matter at all. Soon, we will command the entire collective knowledge of the human race with our fingertips (or our eyes, or our gestures or our brains). Professors need to help their students tackle the big picture problems, rather than mire them in the minutia. For the most part, they do a wonderful job of this, but most tests are wildly out of date: taking away our tools and asking us to perform fact-based tasks prepares us for the 1970′s, not the 21st century.

Last time I attended trivia night, I saw several people Googling answers under tables. Yes, they were cheating. But at some point, we won’t be able to stop them, and we won’t want to. During our lifetimes “searching it” will become the same as “knowing it.” We should accept that today.

Teach For America

This non-profit organization recruits college graduates and professionals to teach in urban and rural communities throughout the United States in order to provide high quality education to underprivileged children who cannot afford the kind of education they deserve. Teach for America has over 1,200 employees, a ten percent increase over last year.  One of the perks is a week-long vacation around every holiday. The organization was ranked 82nd on Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For (2011)” and has recruited a total of 37 CMC students over the past five years. The fourth application deadline to be a Corps Member  is January 6th, 2011. Apply here.

Deloitte

With almost 40,000 employees in the United States alone, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, commonly referred to as Deloitte, is one of the Big Four accounting firms along with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG.  It is the world’s second largest professional services network, offering audit, tax, consulting, enterprise risk, and financial advisory services in over 150 countries. Deloitte is known for its diversity.  According to Fortune, a third of Deloitte employees are nonwhite. The business was ranked 63rd in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For (2011)” and over the past five years has hired 21 CMC students. Check out their website here.

PricewaterhouseCoopers

Another of the Big Four, PwC is the world’s largest professional services firm in terms of revenue, with operations across 757 cities in 154 countries. Similar to Deloitte, its main services include tax advisory, assurance, audit services, general advisory, and consulting. PwC also happens to be the firm that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences goes to in order to tabulate and certify the votes for the Academy Awards. The company was ranked 73rd in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For (2011)” and is known for work flexibility, training and ethics. PwC has recruited a total of 18 students from CMC since 2007. Apply online or get more information here.

Google

Clearly, no introduction is required, but I Googled it anyway, and found that the world’s largest search engine’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google came in 4th on the “100 Best Companies to Work For (2011).”  What makes them so great?  Fortune writes, “The search giant is famous for its laundry list of perks including free food at any of its cafeterias, a climbing wall, and, well, free laundry.”  Since 2007, 11 CMC-ers, 7 of which were from 2011’s graduating class, have been helping the company achieve its mission.

Ernst & Young

The most globally managed of the Big Four, E&Y has member firms in over 140 countries. Its four main service lines are assurance, advisory services, tax services, and transaction advisory services. Not only was it ranked the 9th largest private company in the US in 2010 by Forbes magazine, it also topped BusinessWeek’s list of “Best Places to Launch a Career” in 2008. It landed the 77th position on the “100 Best Companies to Work For (2011)” rankings. EY has hired a total of 9 students from CMC since 2007, five of which were from the class of 2010. Get more information here.

Other companies that seem to particularly like CMC graduates include the fourth of the Big Four accountancy firms, KPMG, which has recruited 3 students, Parco, Inc., Semler Brossy Consulting Group, and Cornerstone Research, which all hired 4 CMC students over the past five years. Mercer and Merrill Lynch also appear on the list with a total of 3 CMCers each.

We are proud to have such an impressive list of global companies offering CMCers such amazing opportunities despite the not-so-great job market, and we’re sure the class of 2012 is only going to give us more reason to hold our heads up high.

Professors, other adults, and your parents probably think that you are really good at using a computer. Based on my none-too-empirical observations of most Claremont McKenna College students, unless you’re an Resident Technology Assistant or Lab Technology Assistant, you probably suck at using a computer. Test number one: Are you reading this article on Internet Explorer? If yes, stop reading this article and download literally any other browser. All of the other options are faster, better designed, have more features, and are more secure. Subtest A: Do you know how to download another browser? If no, I’m not sure I can help you. Ok, now read on.

Should every CMC student be able to configure a VPN or access their computer’s root directory? No. Nobody wants to put the RTAs out of a job. There are, however, a lot of simple things you can do in order to make the time you spend on your computer more efficient, leaving more time for Reddit, or The Vampire Diaries, or, you know, being outside.

On Friday, September 23, Seaver Theatre was full of excitement and intellectual curiosity.  The captive audience heard ideas from six speakers and watched two videos from previous TED talks.  The theme for the evening was “Friending the Future.” The chosen speakers were people who not only excelled in their respective fields but also channeled their work in a way that they could give back to society.

Gordon Zacks, the first speaker  of the night, is a leading industrialist and Chairman of the R.G Barry Corporation. He spoke about the lessons that he learned from his father and his business on humility, adaptability and stability. Zacks noted, “The most important thing you can learn about yourself is your limitations.”  He continued, “The leader, the manager has to be able to say, I don’t know… what do you think.” Zacks reminds us that we need to focus on how our actions–as students, colleagues, and even future CEOs–can help others.  The next speaker was someone who’s work does just that.

Medicine is all you need to cure disease right? Apparently not, according to Doctor Karl Haushalter, a professor at Harvey Mudd, a pioneer in AIDS research and a man whose moving words reflect his unrelenting passion for the work he does. Haushalter stressed the importance of social involvement involved in the treatment of AIDS and opened our minds to a whole new aspect of medicine.

Allen Proctor, an ex-Chief Financial Officer for Harvard University and expert in the non-profit sector, spoke next about the fallacies people have regarding the non-profit sector and of the importance of the sector itself. He noted that the role of non-profits is to be reliable providers of community needs as long as the private sector cannot do it.

Anyone called ‘Doctor Love’ is obviously doing something correct with his life, and indeed Paul Zak (the next speaker) is. Zak is a professor of Economics and the Department Chair and Founder of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University.  He studies the effects of oxytocin and testosterone on human behavior and, with his prescriptions like “hug at least eight people a day”, Zak seemed like a cross between a scientist and Ziggy Marley. His other challenge to the audience was to perform at least one random act of kindness a day.  One noteworthy piece of advice that he gave was to try going on a roller coaster on a first date. He claims, “it’s like three dates in one.”

The last two talks of the evening had the largest impact on me, personally  (in no small part  because of my own struggling attempts at gardening and music). Jesse Dubois, the penultimate speaker, is an LA based urban agriculturalist whose team converts personal gardens and yards into little self-sustaining organic farms through a process called ‘farmscaping’. The night concluded with Mateo Messina, a Grammy-winning musician talking about his passion for music, and how it drives him to give back to society. Messina believes his job is about “cuing” emotion through music.  He incidentally cannot read a note of music (Jimmy Hendrix couldn’t read music either, OK guys?), and yet has composed and conducted symphonies and even written a number of film scores. Messina played a clip of himself performing Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, with an all-girls student choir and the the rock band Alice in Chains. He also scored the music for Juno.

The show also included two video talks from previous TED events.  Eli Pariser, President of  MoveOn’s board and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, spoke about the impact of Google and internet search engines on what type of information we see online. Deb Roy, an Michigan Institute of Technology professor, spoke about social connections by analyzing television and Tweeted reactions.  He also installed videocameras and videotaped his home for six months, studying social connections and capturing the first months of his son.

Jesse Dubois’s company has one hundred clients; Gordon Zacks owns a huge footwear company. These two speakers come from extremely contrasting backgrounds and yet their talks shared the theme of inspiration. All the speakers at the event taught us that we can help create a better future while having extremely satisfying careers.  Talks such as these show us that people can combine both success and meaning in their life.  Also, the talks were just plain interesting.

The talks brought like-minded Claremont students together for some intellectual engagement.  Students learned by personally interacting with the speakers and with one another at the informal discussion sessions. It is a shame that not all applications were accepted as some seats were empty. The talks were a sheer delight and for many to have missed them seemed a waste. The lack of female speakers was also quite clear and organizers would do well to work them into the program at a future event.

Overall, the event was a resounding success. A good talk leaves the listener with a sense of awe and happiness that they have learned something. That is exactly what the TEDx talks did for me. From music to retail to agriculture to psychology, the audience was taken on a journey through the lives of people who have seen great success and are using their talents to help create a better future. The talks were inspirational; one can only hope that we live such successful lives after Claremont.

Crescit cum commercio civitas. Civilization prospers with commerce: indeed, it does. And our college strikes out to prepare our students to be leaders in commerce and in the great institution that facilitates it: government. There is no doubt in my mind that graduating Stags and Athenas–perhaps more than any other graduates in the country–leave our school with a stronger background in civics, economics, and the theories and frameworks that drive and guide these fields. CMC aims to go beyond merely producing great businessmen and women–we seek to produce leaders in society.

Claremont McKenna College recently redesigned its website. Here are my thoughts on the redesign. Note
that I don’t have any data, and I haven’t conducted any tests on users, so the stuff I’m writing here might be totally bunk. But if no one has any data, we might as well go with my opinion, as I’ve read the entire back collection of
articles on useit.com, as well as Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, and CMC’s Public Affairs Office probably hasn’t.

The Good

The new “Quick Links” bar.

This has a good list of places that I visit most often. This should probably be contextual based on the page you’re currently on, so the “Faculty” page would have different quick links than the “Students” page, but again they should be testing this on actual users.

Contact information on most pages.

Most pages have phone numbers and addresses listed in a prominent location. This is an excellent step and something I’ve called for.

The footer.

On a site like CMC’s where users have a diverse set of goals, you want to get people to where they are trying to go as quickly as possible. The footer makes this possible with a ton of deep links to pages you probably want to visit.

Much more readable faculty profile pages, as well as an acknowledgment that social media and student websites exist.

The Bad

Horribly small default font size.

The default font size is 11px, which is fine for people under 40, but really difficult to read for people over 40, especially because users don’t know how to change the font size in their browser. In addition, a small font size makes a link more difficult to click on because the target is so small – see Fitts Law. The small font size makes it hard to distinguish text in low contrast environments as well.

Not changing the color of visited links.

On a Google search results page, I can see at one glance which links I’ve already visited, because they are purple. No such luck on CMC’s site, which displays every link in blue. This violates rule #3 of Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design, and has been shown in tests to disorient users, and cause them to visit the same page over and over.

The menu bar text shows up inconsistently.

The menu bar is the series of grayish-red boxes, which as you can see contain no text. This photo was using the latest version of Chrome on a Mac. Props to CMC for trying to use Cufon but they need to work out the bugs and test in all browsers.

No mobile version of the site.

Mobile devices should load an alternate stylesheet that presents the main content without the fluff, to save bandwidth and optimize the information presentation for a smaller screen.

Clicking on the logo doesn’t take you back to the frontpage.

When you click on the logo in the corner of every page you are taken to cmc.edu/discovercmc, instead of the homepage. This violates a well known usability convention: if the logo is clickable, it should take you to the homepage. I challenge you to find a top 500 website where this is not true.

No Analytics.

This means that Public Affairs isn’t collecting data about which pages are popular, which keywords users are searching for to find our site, and which links are being clicked on, which implies they don’t really care about how users use the site, and will hurt their ability to iteratively improve the site navigation in the future.

No caching site resources or minifying Javascript.

Page load times are slow; CMC scores only 63/100 in Google’s Online Page Speed tool. Because no images, scripts or stylesheets are cached, they have to be reloaded every time the user reloads a page. This is costly in terms of speed and bandwidth. Fortunately this is easily fixable in Apache.

The Ugly

The homepage.

Holy cow, this is a mess. Some of the problems:

• No search bar. This is stupid – the search bar exists in the page’s source  but is hidden from the user.
• Fourteen links to other pages. On a page whose goal should be to get users as deep within the site as quickly as possible, having this few links is unacceptable.
• Incredibly small link targets make the links hard to click.
• No skip links for disabled users.
• The “Discover CMC” link looks like an ad, and I missed it the first six times I visited the homepage
• There’s no way to determine at a glance what separates CMC from every other university. One of the boxes has some bland text below a “Why CMC” header but the page has to do better.
• It’s not clear where you should click to find any of the items described here:
• No meta description or keywords, which are essential for search engine optimization (SEO).

Fortunately, if my search habits are at all typical, most people use Google instead of the homepage to find resources on CMC’s site. But the new homepage is the flagship, and it violates most usability guidelines. It reminds me of flash intro sites from the ’90′s that used to load when you went to Nike.com or Boo.com. Those flash intros looked really cool when they were presented to management, but loaded slowly and caused loads of usability problems, which is why sites don’t have flash intros anymore. The homepage is a huge step backwards from the old page.

Big Images that Convey No Information

Here’s the homepage for current students:

And here are the parts of that page that are actually clickable:

The prime real estate on the page is taken by an unclickable infographic telling us that upperclassmen return to campus on August 28. Here’s the same information, in a more compressed format:

“8/28 Students Return”

The image on the page is 465 pixels wide by 290 high, or 134850 pixels of screen real estate. My compressed version is roughly 150 pixels wide by 18 high, for 2700 pixels of screen space, a 4900% improvement in information density.

More generally, big images take forever to load (especially important on mobile devices) and don’t contribute anything to the page. User test after user test shows users ignore filler images, and that visual bloat is annoying.

The SEO strategy/URL’s are still awful.
To illustrate CMC’s nonexistent approach to search engine optimization (SEO), I’ll use the faculty page for my
thesis reader:

The page looks OK – the email link is a little wonky but it’s fine. Now, what are the keywords we’d like to use to describe this page? The biggest one is the name of the professor – Ananda Ganguly. The second biggest is his department, Accounting, and then maybe we want to also have CMC as a keyword.

URL Contains No Keywords

Let’s look at the page URL, which Google uses as part of its PageRank formula to determine what’s actually on the page:

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/academic/faculty/profile.php?Fac=519

This URL does not contain any of our relevant keywords, making the page tougher to find in a Google Search.

Nondescript Page Title

Let’s look at the page title, which shows up in the browser bar, and is the bright blue link text when the page shows up in Google results, as well as a large component in the PageRank formula:

The page title is “Academics,” which tells you zero about the page content. Since this page title is so non-descriptive, Google had to use its own algorithm to give the page a descriptive title in search results:

Generic Meta Tags

Let’s look at the page meta description, which shows up as the black text below the blue text in a search result in Google:

The meta description is “Academics and research at Claremont McKenna College,” which is generic enough that Google has to try to find better text on the page to use. The result isn’t optimal:

No H1 Heading

Pages should have exactly one h1 heading containing information about the primary subject of the page text on the page. There’s a perfect candidate – the professor’s name, Ananda Ganguly. This text does not have an h1 heading – in fact, there’s not a single h1 heading on the page.

No Alt Text for Images

There’s a nice image of Professor Ganguly on the page. Images can’t be crawled, it’s important to provide an alt tag so Google knows what’s in the image, as well as for blind users or users on slow internet connections. However, the image does not have an alt tag, so Google doesn’t know the subject of the image.

Those are some really, really basic SEO optimizations. Figuring that stuff out would make CMC pages more prominent when researchers from other schools search for work done by CMC professors. I haven’t done a thorough examination but I’m not confident that the rest of the site does much better.

Conclusion

I have the following questions for the CMC Public Affairs Office:

1. When deciding what to emphasize in the site redesign, did you interview a single user of the site? Did you ask any students, prospective students, faculty members, staff members, alumni members, or parents, about how they use the CMC website?
2. How does the redesigned site address the complaints raised by users in question (1)?
3. Could you explain how the new frontpage does a better job of conveying CMC’s brand than the old frontpage? When you showed the frontpage to prospective students for 30 seconds and asked them to say what set CMC apart, what did they tell you?
4. What metrics are you using to determine the success of the site redesign?
5. What was the decision making process during the design of the site? Was evidence from user testing ever presented to inform design decisions?

CMC’s website hasn’t been that great for years and it’s good to see that it’s finally getting more attention and resources. But while the new design is flashy, it’s not clear that it became more usable, which is disappointing.

Do you have any suggestions for the new cmc.edu makeover? Please post your suggestions, comments, criticisms below.

If this is you, keep reading. Even though my article is targeted at Twitter skeptics, my goal is not to try to convince every person out there to get on Twitter. Rather, I’ll briefly summarize how Twitter works and why it’s important, so that even if you aren’t a Twitter power user or use the noun “tweeple,” you can still get a gist of what’s going on in those 140-character bits of text, hashtags, replies, mentions, DMs, geotags, and TwitPics.

An eye-opening moment for me came during serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk’s (@garyvee) talk at the Athenaeum in April. He asked how many members of the audience knew what Twitter was. Since it was mostly young CMC wannabe entrepreneurs, pretty much every hand went up. Then he asked how many of those people actually had a Twitter account, and only 40% of of the hands remained up. Next he asked who used Twitter every day and it was pretty much down to Kevin Burke (@nivekekrub) and myself. Which roughly stacks up against the data, according to a study by eMarketer.

Only 11% of Americans are on Twitter, while about half are on Facebook. And of those 30-40 million people, only 21% are active users. So there’s the first misconception about Twitter–especially for old school business executives trying to “understand the youth generation”. They think everyone is on Twitter when, simply put, they’re not.

Second misconception: Twitter is trying to compete with Facebook. It’s a different animal entirely. Here’s one way to understand it: Twitter is a concert. Facebook is a bar. They’re kind of similar, in that they’re both very social environments. At a bar, you talk to people, have a few beers, upload some photos, and poke someone. The value is based on your interaction with people you know and are close to. At a concert, you rub shoulders, talk to those around you, but you’re mostly there to listen to the band. You don’t go to a concert to talk to your friends. It’s a community atmosphere, but the value is more in the connection you make with the band (read: the people you follow on Twitter). I’m not on Twitter just to listen to @Mr_Right207, @kelseykbrown, or even @CarlPeaslee. (Although @jpitney is worth your time.) The real reason I’m checking my Twitter feed is to get updates from @CoryBooker, @google, or @NickKristof. The people that I’m not Facebook friends with are the ones that I care about on Twitter (an econ kid would call these “complementary goods”).

Here is a quick overview of how Twitter works if you’re new to the game. You have your homepage with a “timeline.” You “follow” other users, whose tweets appear in reverse chronological order, with the newest on top, in your timeline. When you tweet (in 140 characters or less) your tweets appear in the timelines of people that follow you. People use “hashtags” (e.g. #osama, #hangover2, #robotpickuplines) to organize tweets. You can click on a hashtag and instantly see every tweet worldwide with that tag.

So why is Twitter valuable to the average person?

Answer A: it’s essentially a curated source of news. It’s my best source for my specific interests. I care a lot about maps and geography and local politics (weird, I know) so my Twitter feed is populated by people who are constantly posting links related to my interests. I follow @SimpleGeo, @pwire, and @IdeaGov because their thoughts and links match my unique interests.  There’s no website where I can go and get that exact same combination.  Likewise, I tend to tweet about these topics, so I’ve built up a number of followers who (hopefully) follow me because I have something interesting to contribute from time to time.

Sure, I laugh at the occasional tweet from @jessekblum, but I get more value out of following @CapitolAlert (Sacramento Bee California politics news). Here are some accounts that I recommend following as generally valuable to anyone: @BillGates (he does cool stuff), @CoryBooker (the best mayor in America and probably the most active Twitter user as well), @thedailybeast (great general news) and of course, our beloved @cmcforum.

Answer B: entertainment. There are some fantastically funny people on Twitter. While Kelsey Brown was writing this article about how to occupy yourself during your internship last summer, I was following @BPGlobalPR’s hilarious satire of BP’s cleanup efforts during the oil spill. Sample tweet: “If you fall off your horse, get back on. If your horse explodes and leaks oil everywhere, try to sell that oil. #bpcares” (July 9). During Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral campaign in Chicago this winter, @MayorEmanuel took the city by storm with his profane, satirical account of the election. The guy behind that account is now publishing all of the tweets in a book.  A sprinkle of entertainment is what makes Twitter fun. I also recommend @StephenAtHome (Stephen Colbert) and @TheOnion.

Answer C: instant commentary on breaking news. When Osama bin Laden was killed, the first news came via Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld. Twenty minutes before anything was said on CNN, millions of people were already buzzing about it on Twitter. The night of the announcement, there was an average of 3,500 tweets per second–a record. This peaked at slightly over 5,100 tweets per second just before Obama went on TV. By offering a global forum to quickly disseminate and discuss news, well before official news outlets can broadcast it, Twitter can be immensely useful. Especially in a disaster situation, when electricity and landline phones are knocked out, sending tweets from smartphones can be the fastest way to get information out. An amazing tool called Ushahidi is working on doing exactly that.

Answer D: @CharlieSheen. Enough said. Here’s how he responded to the bin Laden news.

Are you lost in the world without a Twitter account? No. But hopefully after reading this, you’re a little more aware of how Twitter works and why a couple hundred million people are on it. Whatever you do, just don’t let @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) get any more followers.

Don’t forget to follow @cmcforum to be the first to read breaking news, the newest articles and the biggest announcements.

Shameless self promotion: @d_meyer.

Getting the Gear

The good news is, getting a surfboard at the Claremont Colleges is pretty easy. My favorite 5C club, On The Loose (OTL), will check them out like library books. You have to put down $150 for a deposit, but you get it back when the board is safely returned. If you have any Mudd friends, you can get both a wetsuit and surfboard through their program as well. For a board, you are going to want to get a pretty long one with a soft top to start out on. Also, until it warms up in the summer, and sometimes even then, wetsuits are a necessity. While On The Loose lacks in the wetsuit arena, many surf shops will rent them to you for as little as $7.50 a day (i.e. 15th Street Surf Shop, Newport Beach).

Taking It To the Ocean

Now that you have the gear, you have to brave the California freeways for an hour to get anywhere. If you have something like an SUV, lay down the seats and problem solved. Otherwise, you are going to have to invest in some kind of roof racs. Although tying your board down with ropes is an option, it’s much safer and faster if you buy the attachment that corresponds with your rack system. In most cases, it will cost you about $100 for the official attachments.

If transportation isn’t an option, you can always rent at the beach. You can usually rent boards by the hour, and a good day of surfing with a wetsuit will usually run no more than about $30-$40. If you can’t get to the beach, On The Loose sometimes hosts surf trips, which you can check out on their website.

When You Arrive

Assuming you’ve succeeded in the above areas, you have now squeezed into your wetsuit and are standing on the beach with your surfboard. If you’re lucky, you have an expert California surf buddy with you willing to show you the tricks of the trade. If not, you might want to suck up your pride and take a beginning lesson to get your feet wet. This can be pretty expensive, anywhere from $50-$100, but it will help you get the feel of surfing which, when you think about it, is a really unnatural thing to do. Also, don’t be afraid to talk to the surfers in the water, chances are they are named something like Zack or Cody and live up to the laid-back surfer stereotype.

Where to go? Newport/Huntington Beach and Santa Monica/Venice Beach are all about an hour away from campus. If you surf, help us out by telling us some favorite nearby beaches in the comments.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] William Jefferson Clinton is my second favorite Arkansan. Johnny Cash is numero uno.