So the experiment continues. Up from 10 followers on Monday to 65 this morning. Will it be 100 by next Tuesday? We'll see. The holiday here in the states might slow things down.

Intereting things from my tweetstream:

• Tweetsgiving
• PolicyPitch
• SEC Outlines Its Reasoning For Shutting Down P2P Lender Prosper
• Refugees International
• FORGE & transparency: How radical do we want to be?
• Five mistakes international organizations make when using Twitter

And so it begins. I know not what I am getting myself into, but heck, this should be fun. I have increased the number of people I am following, made my post here on Social Edge and have gone from having 10 followers to 34:

I have also found some interesting information via my Twitter stream this morning. Via @kanter I found 10 Ways to Give Back on Thanksgiving and via the Chronicle of Philanthropy I found out that Chris Garrett and John Haydon are experts having a discussion today about raising money via Twitter and other Social Networking tools at 12 noon today, about 40 minutes from right now.

Now it's time to actually start following Guy's tips and see what happens.

Come and join the fun!

I have been on Twitter for about 15 months now. I know that it's the bees knees, the fuh-schizzle and all that, but evidently I'm doing it wrong. Okay, no qualifier needed, I am doing it wrong. I post things every once in a while, in spurts, and I look at the posts of the people I'm following in spurts, but... it doesn't do much for me. I expect that this is becasue I haven't embraced it, so I am launching a new little project for myself: Operation Twitter Relevance.

My interest was piqued this morning when I received an email from Wall Blank that included a Twitter link. They have No-Profit Prints that they sell each Friday, with all proceeds going to a non-profit of the artist's choosing. This past Friday the artist was Isaac Wiebe and the non-profit was Kiva. I bought 1% of the limited edition prints so if you want one, you'd better hurry up and get over there.

I was reminded of a post by Guy Kawasaki about how to pick up followers on Twitter. Sounds like an online version of how to pick up girls, but I read it anyway. When the first tip was to follow social media whores, I found myself feeling even more like I was gearing up to go hit on girls at the local meat market. I carried on because I have heard about how integral and useful a tool Twitter can be, and I recognize that it is the kind of tool that requires a certain amount of critical mass before it becomes useful. A mass communication tool is not going to do much for you if you use it to communicate with a few close friends and a handful of lookie-loos. And I only have a handful of followers and followees:

I feel like such a bad geek, a geek imposter if you will. It's time for me to step up to the plate and really figure out how this thing works. Either that or I need to close up shop and admit that I'm more luddite than geek, and go back to my comfortable mid-20th century lifestyle that I had back before ATMs came to rule the earth.

So let Operation Twitter Relevance commence! I will be following Guy's 10 tips for picking up followers and will report back on what happens. I'll even set a goal and see if I can reach it. Let's shoot for 100 followers by next Tuesday morning, shall we? I'm most interested to see how many folks in the non-profit/social entrepreneurship sphere are using Twitter, and how effective it has been for them. If you are interested in joining my little experiment, I'm over here.

It's a year since they debuted and I have yet to see one of the OLPC XO laptops for myself. I was out of the office when a coworker brought one in to the office. A fellow traveler had one with him when I was on vacation last Christmas, but it never made its way out into the open. At a conference I glanced into my available wi-fi networks and saw OLPC Mesh as an available option. I feel like a photographer in search of a snow leopard. I know it's out there, the evidence is plain as can be, but I have yet to see it. Like many people, I have a hard time believing in soething until I've been able to put my grubby little mitts on it. Or at least see it.

Last year there was a Give One Get One program, where you could buy an XO Laptop for yourself as long as you bought one for a child in the emerging world, and it would only set you back $399. This year the program is happening again, with distribution handled through Amazon. Having Amazon handle distribution is a good move in my opinion, because it gives the program more legitimacy and permanence while giving people a known entity to deal with in case any troubles arise, as they did last year. Amazon knows distribution, so these kind of problems shouldn't happen this time.

Also on the OLPC front is news that the government of Columbia has ordered the systems - running Windows XP. I think it is a shame that these innovative machines won't be running their innovative OS, but... since I haven't actually had my grubby little mitts on the thing, I'll reserve judgement for now. I lament the curtailing of innovation in any form, but especially when innovation is replaced with something as humdrum and compromising as XP.

In case you are wondering about the importance of stopping the traffic of e-waste from the first to third world, this video from 60 Minutes should clear up any doubt in your mind. The most insidious thing about this video, to me, is that it shows someone who is making a living off of rightly vilifying the very activity that he and his company are perpetuating.

I don't want to give up my tech toys and business tools. The high tech supply chain is broken. Work is being done to fix it on both ends, but it is without a doubt broken. Even when devices are recycled, how does the recycler know what they are made up of? How do they know which phone or which monitor contains lead or other toxic chemical compounds and what they should do with each?

Devices need to be designed better with recycling in mind. It needs to be easier to track the elements that make up the individual components that are assembled to create your music player or your TV. Information about products needs to get into the hands of the recyclers so that they can properly dismantle and dispose of them.

Companies that export illegal e-waste overseas need to be put out of business, and their proprietors need to see the inside of a jail cell. Either that or they can put them to work recycling their e-waste with their bare hands and swim in a river of their own filth. If it's good enough for the people they're sending this stuff to to pull apart, why, it certainly wouldn't be something they would mind doing themselves, is it?

Watch CBS Videos Online

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4586903n

Via Seth, I found a way to loan through Kiva while offering up nothing more than my pride.

I picked a ZZ Top beard, because every girl's crazy for a Sharp Dressed Man. 

Sometimes change is hard. Sometimes it seems like there's no hope. Then again, sometimes change is simple, fun and silly. It doesn't feel like change at all when that happens. It just seems like you found a fun new toy to play with.

Wheeeeeeeee!