There's a ton of great material out there on the nuances of the Iranian election and protests, and I just want to quickly throw some thoughts into the ring.

First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent — in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag¹ #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN's decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.

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I had the immense pleasure of spending most of the week in Toronto, training about 90 people on the ins and outs of all things social tech. It was an honor to join the other trainers, real rockstars of both American and Canadian social tech for social good worlds: Beka Economopoulos, Cheryl Contee, Roz Lemieux, Jason Mogus, Sam Dorman, Phillip Djwa, Darrell Houle, Samer Rabadi, Eric Squair, Tim Walker, Julia Watson… man, I felt smarter just hanging out with these peeps all week.

Here's some links to the presentations and workshops that I led and co-led all week; thanks to the participants who took killer notes. There's tons of incredible info on, and being added to, this wiki, so check back often:

• Inspiration: Social Networks (midway down the page). Day one was all about showing our participants the myriad of tools at their disposal and some successes that others have had. [PowerPoint preso here]
• Measure THIS! Social Media ROI. How to think about metrics for social media work. [No session notes yet, but PowerPoint preso here.]
• Engaging business leaders and decision-makers through social media, led with Eric Squair.
• Twitter for Individuals and Organizations. (shocker, right?)

Just to call out this great presentation I had the pleasure of giving via webinar to the National Safe Schools Roundtable yesterday — and a big shoutout to Sarah Young of ACLU-MS for major coordination skillz! A good time was had by all:

http://www.deannazandt.com/presentations/nssr/

Incredibly exciting news came across the transom last night while I was at the Women Who Tech after-party in NYC: I've been offered a book deal with the stellar Berrett-Koehler publishing group in San Francisco. I'm absolutely thrilled to be working with Johanna Vondeling, their vice president of editorial and digital, and the rest of the staff there. Their commitment to social change as well as digital innovation for publishing makes them the perfect fit for what I want to do.

What do I want to do, I hear you asking yourself? In short — I do want you to buy the book, after all — I'm going to be describing the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action. If you've read some of what I've written about Twitter and other services, and my ideas about the giant gene pool and the desperate need for diversity, you have an idea of where the book will go. Plus, it'll be stunningly entertaining to boot!

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Everyone's abuzz about Digg founder Kevin Rose's new project, WeFollow. It's essentially a Twitter directory that allows users to add themselves by category/keywords/tags. It then displays all users in that tag, sorting them by putting the users with the most followers up top.

This is where I breathe a heavy, dramatic sigh.

The problem with systems like this is that it reinforces an exponential curve of people whose cups already runneth over with followers. Why is this a drag? Well, because it doesn't teach the avid Twitter user anything new. Take a look at the social media tag in the directory, for example. Gee whiz, there's something called Mashable? And they've got 3 bazillion followers? Do tell me more.

While I love Mashable and read it daily, I already knew that they were on Twitter, and I'm already following them. Same goes for most of the other keywords I checked out. If I'm going to branch out my Twitter stream with new sources, I want to be surprised– I want the woman no one's ever heard of tweeting interesting, valuable information.

This is where the kicker is, isn't it? How does a developer design a system to provide value to sets of users with wildly different needs? It's not impossible; Flickr does it with photographs. It can't be that hard to deconstruct interestingness from text, based on some of the factors discussed in this blog post on the Flickr algorithm: favorites, who references it, how often it's referenced, where it's referenced.

I encourage people to find followers organically when they reach the point that they're ready to branch out: look at who you're already following is replying to, and check out their feed. Mr Tweet simulates this to a certain degree and makes recommendations (but still reinforces the many-followers problem of WeFollow).

In my mind, there's nothing (yet) to replace the organic chemistry of interestingness in the human brain.

(This is part 2 of a chicken-'n'-egg series explaining the usefulness of Twitter. If you get what Twitter is, but need help getting started, you might want to look at "A non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter.")

I'm tapping away furiously on my Blackberry as a friend arrives to join me for coffee. "Whatcha working on?" he asks.

"Just updating my Twitter," I say. "Two secs."

"Twitter, huh? I just don't get it, I guess."

"Oh, my. Allow me to get you to 'get' it, my friend."

This is a conversation I have often, and while it might make some diehard Twitterers cringe, I relish this moment to expound and explain this little phenomenon that's happening around Twitter and services like it. I've clearly drunk the Kool-Aid of the micro-blogging revolution, and I'd love to walk you through some of the ways people are enjoying it.

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Just a quick note of announcement here (especially for you RSS people that never come to the site, haha): I've updated the design of dz.com to reflect a little more "practice what I preach." Why yes, look at that fancy new sidebar, with my lifestream, where else you can find me online… oh, and is that a tag cloud? Yay. Tag clouds are just about my favorite thing in web 2.0. Also, ye RSS peeps: you'll find now that there's two feeds to choose from: one with just my blog posts (same ol', same ol'), and one that will give you my lifestream (blog posts plus twitter, digg activity, what-have-you).

In addition to being a little bit more practical and up-to-date, this will also serve as some public documentation of my upcoming month in Berlin and other parts of Germany, so stay tuned for news and enjoy!