How to not be bad at the Internet

Andrew posted this helpful list of tips for being a good citizen of the Web 2.0 world from Jaron Lanier. Read them. Follow them. Unless you’re just using Twitter purposefully as a vessel for self promotion.

The problem with Web 2.0 is that the signal to noise ratio is skewed because it’s so easy to take part. It’s too easy to take part. This goes a long way to explaining the problem with more than 90% of the status updates that clutter up Facebook. Here’s the list:

• Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realise that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are Twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.