Should we plunge headlong into the waves and hope to remain bouyant in the social media storm or head for maven haven on the mountain top?

The web is awash with water metaphors, from streaming video to bittorrent file-sharing protocols. And now we have Google Wave, Mozilla Raindrop and open access to the Twitter firehose.

Similar metaphors are often used to describe human emotional experience and the unconscious realm of memories, dreams and reflections. However, as always when venturing into Neptune’s watery domain, not everything is quite as it appears to be.

The internet is not a series of tubes directly interconnecting nodes to create communications channels but a packet-switching network in which content is divided into little data parcels sent via multiple momentarily-determined routes before being reassembled at its destination.

This engineering not only makes the internet very robust it also makes it neutral, as the data packets are carried without regard for their content. All data is thus equal online, notwithstanding the recent use of deep packet inspection by some Internet Service Providers to discriminate against certain kinds of traffic.

So data does not travel in hyperreality the same way as water flows through the real world. What does this have to do with the way we think about the web?

Being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality is always important, but never more so than when we are considering what we might be inclined to view as a techno-utopian fountain of knowledge.

Computer networks may operate according to the packet-switching protocols that govern them, but the humans that use them continue to behave in ways described by social psychology: in herds, influenced by status and impressed by cultural and political authority.

This is what results in an internet that resembles the image above, rather than the egalitarian interdependency that is often promoted as the brave new world wide web.

A research project plotting the topological structure of the internet in terms of the connections between nodes, while taking into account the roles the connections play, produced some arresting results.

It turns out that a dense core of a few critical highly-connected nodes are surrounded by an outer periphery of many sparsely-connected nodes which are heavily dependent on the core. Between the two lies a mantle of very many peer-connected and largely self-sufficient nodes. If the core is removed from the network, about 30 percent of the outer nodes become completely isolated.

This concentration of traffic in a few dense nodes supports the view that behemoths like Google, Facebook and Twitter excessively influence the web in the same way as key superpowers influence global politics and culture.

It also reflects the inequitable distribution of power, wealth and influence in our world.

An open web is an equal web. We must not mistakenly assume that the neutrality of computer networks is a metaphor, and guarantee, for equality in the human interactions they enable.

And there is no need for another metaphor to make the point that, like water, not all of us have equal access to the resources on which this new world order depends.

See also How Twitter Works In Theory and the subsequent Twitter Thoery Applied To Google Buzz for more about Flow, Faces, Phatic, Following, Publics, Mutual Media and Small World Networks.

In a radio interview broadcast last week, debut novelist Natasha Solomons discusses the best way for authors to promote their books with publishing consultant Damian Horner.

She makes effective use of online social media to promote her work with a stylish blog, an active twitter habit and a regularly-updated Facebook page, and is embarking on an attempt to break the world record for book events.

She even gets requests from Australia for book club appearances via Skype.

Damian Horner’s sobering statistic, that the average author only makes £4,500 per annum from writing, doesn’t lead to despair in this positive account of personal marketing strategies for contemporary content creators.

It can tell you what’s happening in real time in a way no other platform can beat, as well as offering bite-sized insight into the minds of movers and shakers in every field.

Of course, it’s also a vast echo chamber for the chattering classes and is often awash with internet memes, so here’s a quick start guide to help you hit the ground running and cut to the twitter universe chase.

Get started

Sign up at twitter.com and complete all the profile information to make you easier for other people to find.

Add your mobile number and try using the service from your phone as well. Once you get going you will find you never need to use the twitter website again.

You might also like to edit your background image or change it to a custom design of your own to further promote your credentials.

Find and follow people

Target influencers in your subject area(s) and search for them by name then see who they are following. Beware of hoaxers!

Tools to use:

• tweepz offers advanced search options that improve on twitter’s own people search
• twellow is a directory of users by topic
• wefollow organises users by hashtag
• twitterholic is the definitive toplist by number of followers
• whoshouldifollow finds people similar to those you already follow.

There are also twitter lists, grouped around topic areas. Check out listorious for lists organised by subject. If you can’t find a list that fits your interests then create one and share your expertise with other people.

Learn tweetspeak

Essential terminology includes:

• @username: counted as a reply if at the beginning of a message or as a mention if elsewhere
• #topic aka hashtag: for flagging and filtering by keyword
• DM: private direct message, will not appear in the public timeline
• RT: retweet (similar to forwarding an email), include author/originator (via @username).

Don’t be daunted! Just dive in and you’ll be surfing the firehose with the best in no time.

Keep it short and sweet

URL shortening service bit.ly has become the de facto standard on twitter. Sign up for an API key to allow remote access calls from your twitter client.

And no rambling! There’s no need to use all 140 characters if you don’t need to.

Be human

Avoid over-using automatically generated tweets from RSS feeds. At the very least intersperse them with messages you have originated or retweeted yourself.

And always try to be real: this is a twenty-first century bush telegraph which thrives on dynamic self-expression.

Be relevant

Tweet when you’ve got something interesting to say or pass on but never just for the sake of it. Remember: no-one cares what you had for breakfast

And stick to what’s happening now: twitter is for zeitgeist not ancient history.

Use a desktop client

You can see who is making the running on twitstat, but your shortlist should include:

• tweetdeck: still king
• tweetie: gorgeous, just like its iPhone app cousin
• seesmic: feature-rich challenger to the tweetdeck crown.

Of course, you could always use the twitter website itself. It is improving all the time and the new local trends feature is worth exploring.

Go mobile

Twitter iPhone apps abound, as you would expect: visit the iPhone app store for the latest offerings.

Twitterrific is probably the best of the free options but tweetie for iPhone looks so good and works so well you’ll almost certainly want to take it home with you.

You can also send and receive updates via SMS from any phone, and there is a purpose-built mobile version of the site that will run on most smartphones at m.twitter.com.

Add photos and videos

A no-brainer. Multimedia always adds interest, but including such content in a 140 character tweet requires a special approach:

• twitpic is the default twitter photo-sharing service for most users by now, and is built in to many of the desktop clients
• vidly is trying hard to become the default twitter video-sharing service (hence the change of name from twitvid)
• twiddeo is also in the fray and worth checking out.

You can also offer audio as a kind of micropodcast via iPhone app tweetmic or web application twaud.io. It’s apparently happening, but I’ve yet to see it.

Cross post

Automatically posting your updates across all the web services you use not only saves time it increases virtuous network effects too.

Brizzly is a good-looking web application that integrates twitter and facebook functionality in one simplified window, so you never need to log in to either website again.

Ping.fm is a web application that allows you to update just about every online social network service you can think of, critically including twitter, facebook, linkedin, flickr and delicious.

Twitterfeed is another web application that converts RSS feeds to twitter updates, so you can network your blog to the world with one click. However there are plenty of plugins that do the same thing for all the major blogging platforms and del.icio.us now has similar functionality built in.

Be sure to check out friendfeed too. It is another kind of social aggregation service that offers something altogether different to twitter, and deserves an article all of its own to tease out its unique benefits.

Scan, search and discover

For many people, twitter is the perfect real-time research tool. There are many services which can help you drill down through the data, but these are all tried and tested essentials:

• tweetscan search by hashtag
• tweetmeme offers up “the hottest links on twitter”, sortable by category and media type
• whatthetrend will tell you what the most inscrutable hashtag is all about, and why that topic is trending in the first place
• twitterlocal is a desktop client that searches for tweets coming from specific locations
• tweetgrid allows you to create a search dashboard that updates in real time
• backtweets delivers twitter search for links by URL.

Found any other useful tools? Like to add them to this list? Follow me @martinredfern and let me know what you think : )

Via Information Is Beautiful

And who could belong to one set without also belonging to the other?