Apparently NBC’s Today Show is now Twittering.

Yesterday I received a notice that the Twitter user Todayshow was following my feed, which is a gentle way of asking “Hey, can you follow my feed, too?” This is a great example of a large organization that wants to leverage Twitter to promote what they’re up to, but hasn’t quite grasped how to do it properly.

Instead of accusing the Today Show of social network corporate invasion, I thought I’d offer up some advice on how to improve their stream. (This can apply to any organization interested in using Twitter.)

1.) Don’t just force your blog’s RSS feeds into your stream. The (insert post title) and (insert url) tweets quickly become non-human, boring and expected. This makes it seem like you’re only using Twitter as a way to auto-syndicate your blog’s content, and that’s not the stuff Twitter users are into. Twitter-ers like conversation.

2.) Keep the tweets under 140 characters. For instance, we don’t know what this means: “Super Shea and Marvelous Mercer: This morning, Meredith interviewed a very inspirational young woman…” If you want us to tune in or watch your online video content, tell us why she’s inspirational and why we should care in less than 140.

3.) Introduce behind-the-scenes stuff and quirky antecdotes. Tell us what Al Roker is doing right now. Does he drink the office coffee or does he bring his own? What’s Willard Scott’s dressing room like? Convince Matt Lauer to personally type a message. Give your Twitter friends some unique stuff that doesn’t exist in your other communication channels.

4.) Try to keep the tweetcount manageable for followers: Between five and ten per day, please. Only Scoble can get away with more.

5.) Consider the Twitter demographics: They are much more likely to consume technology news, so push tech content in your feed.

To sum up, social mediums must be utilized properly in order to be effective. Signing off.

The founder of Pandora.com will be speaking at the Fourth Street Theatre in Des Moines this Thursday evening. The event starts at 7:00 p.m. and is free to the public, so drop by if you’d like to hear stories about the Music Genome Project and surviving the dot-com implosion. See you there!

Click for directions (Enter through Java Joe’s)

Last Saturday I got the chance to roam around WIRED NextFest, an awe-inspiring showcase of wonderful new innovations at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It reminded me of visiting the Future World pavillions at EPCOT Center as a kid, in terms of giddiness for tomorrow’s tech. Below is just a taste of what I saw.

This is FogScreen, an ultrafine curtain of vapor that displays images from a projector. (Including your own face, when you get up close.)

Graphical displays from Hitachi’s Life Microscope. This watch-like device records data about your life rhythms and feeds it to your PC via Wi-fi, helping you to improve (and improvise upon) your quality of life.

Glad to see virtual worlds represented at NextFest. Here’s Second Life on display via Millions of Us, a group that helps organizations establish themselves inside virtual publics. (And, in classic Second Life fashion, the program crashed the computer and had to be restarted.)

One of those bad-ass Minority Report touchscreens!

Google Earth showed off their new Sky feature. You can explore, oh, a hundred million stars and two hundred million galaxies from your desktop. I always love meeting Google employees — there’s no other group of people more passionate about their work.

NASA was all over the place at NextFest, which I loved because I’m a huge space geek. (Space Camp class of ‘91! Woo!!) Anyway, here’s a rover driving over some delighted kids.

Here’s Zou Ren Ti (founder of XSM), who just happened to build a lifelike android twin of himself. Can you tell who is who?

This interactive display meshes your image with a patchwork of 500 YouTube videos. (They call it the YouTube Mirror.)

More coverage: NextFest is all that and then some: NPR report on BoingBoing.

The Greater Des Moines Partnership wants to know why you love DSM, and they want your answers on YouTube. Spreading the Des Moines gospel is critical to the growth and emergence of our city, so let’s help them out — ultimately, groups like the GDMP can’t do it alone.

So, what do you love about living here? Grabbing a basket of tots and a beer at the High Life Lounge? Our local art community and upstart music scene? Unique shops like SMASH and Eden? Whatever it is, grab a camera and some friends, create a video, then upload it to The YouTubes. If it’s deemed coolest, you can even win up to $1,000. (Full details here.)

While we’re on the subject of Des Moines, here’s a nice piece about the city that some of my good pals at Applied Art helped make. Watch “CREATE”:

On Friday I’m headed to Los Angeles to attend WIRED NextFest, a pretty sweet-looking event that’s being billed as our generation’s World’s Fair. On display are fantastic advances in communications tech, robotics, aerospace, security, entertainment, health care and — rumor has it — jet packs!!

I’ll be Twittering while at the event, and you can expect a full blog summary here next week. Adios!

This weekend I was alerted to stay away from Quechup, a sketchy social networking site. (Thanks Mike @ ConverStations!)

Here’s how it works: You receive an invite from a friend asking to join them on Quechup, similar to how you’d be invited to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you’re not careful, Quechup will then wrap its tentacles around your personal address book and spam all your contacts with unsolicited invites.

Quechup being evil is old news — I’m posting about it because this is a fine example of bloggers banding together and using the power of social media to stunt the propagation of spammy practices.