Weiner-gate: Who You Follow Matters

Along with some important basics - either have a hard to guess password or be darn careful who you give your password too - Anthony Weiner learns another more vital Twitter lesson: who you follow matters. This thing isn't going away any time soon for the New York representative, and the latest is a look at the unusual choices of who he followed. For a quick recap of the whole business, Washington Post blog. Also, the good congressman lawyers up.

When I started the official Twitter feed for Arkansas' athletic department back in 2008, I followed all our local media and coaches. As more and more people got on the service, I began to realize that who the official feed follows is a tacit endorsement of those persons. At the time, I wasn't thinking about what are more pressing concerns these days - spammers, sexually explicit and other non-image friendly followers. If you followed one media person, but not another, it looked like we were favoring one over the others.

So I dropped following down to only the other official feeds from UA - even dropping other schools. I moved all that to my personal feed, because as an individual, I could make and maintain those choices as, well, personal.

By the way, why in the world is this "hacking" story continuing to have so much traction days later? Because I get the sense the media believes that this, as I've said, Watergate Bad.