The Omnigeek

Today the University of Kentucky athletic department and the men’s basketball head coach, Billy Gillispie separated ways. The separation was announced at a 4:30pm press conference after several days of speculation. You can follow the Lexington Herald-Leader’s coverage here!

There are numerous reasons why they needed to part ways but they can all be summed up with the fact that the program was going in a direction that Kentucky did not like and Gillispie was not the right coach to change that direction. Tubby Smith drilled a hole in the bottom of the ship and started it sinking. Gillispie was brought in to try and plug that hole, but the ship was still sinking. Now Kentucky needs to find someone who can save things.

But who will that be?

Florida’s head coach, Billy Donovan has been mentioned. He has built a strong program at Florida, a football school. Donovan is a Rick Pitino protege having been his assistant at Kentucky during their magical run. Is he interested? Would he fit in at Kentucky? Even with his National Championship, he is high profile enough? Can he be consistent? Florida didn’t make it into the NCAA tournament this year. That folks is a huge red flag. If Billy G’s failure to make the dance got him chased out of town, why do we think Billy D will be any different? He does come with strong UK cred having been a well respected assistant.

On the subject of assistants, does Kentucky court Leonard Hamilton, the current head coach at Florida State? He was Joe B. Hall‘s long time assistant at Kentucky? He’s partially responsible for one of the banner’s hanging at Rupp Arena with the 1978 National Championship. On the other hand, 1979 was an NIT year (though in fairness, it was a 40 team field, not a 64 team field, so it was harder to get to the big dance. Again, Hamilton doesn’t have the name power to bring in the McDonald’s All American’s needed to be a consistent Top-10 team. Also a major Geek negative, Hamilton’s Wikipedia page is abysmal. If a coach doesn’t have a decent Wikipedia page, how good can he be anyway?

How about convincing Rick Pitino to come home? Joanne will never go for it. So he would have to commute the one hour drive from Louisville to Lexington. I’m sure a private helicopter would be ponied up to make it happen. Arizona is reported to be chasing Pitino, but I doubt Joanne would put up with Tuscon if she couldn’t handle Lexington. But with Pitino just getting Louisville back to national prominence (sure Louisville wants to be a Football School!!!) he would be a fool to win and run.

Pat Riley? He could do the job, but has no interest in college basketball. He’s too used to life in Hollywood East, er. Miami. Lexington would be too simple for him.

Coach K? He would be met at the border with loaded shotguns. Roy Williams? He is the new evil overload of college basketball (though you have to respect him. He is a very good guy to be the arch-devil…..) but he is so happy at UNC, he wouldn’t give it consideration.

Jim Calhoun? The NCAA is looking at his program at UCONN for rules violations. Kentucky can’t risk that route.

John Calipari? He certainly puts together winning teams. He’s yet to win the big one, and in each of his coaching stints, he’s needed two to three years to get the teams to the NCAA. He has the most wins behind Roy Williams among active coaches. His two college jobs lasted 8 and 9 years respectfully, so based on his history, he may be ready to move on.

Bring Bobby Knight out of retirement?

Who ever it is, it can’t be someone who has built a low pressure school to making the dance. He has to be a proven winner. Someone who consistently, year-in and year-out produces a champion. It has to be someone who can thrive under the extreme pressure that is the Kentucky Basketball faithful yet not mind living in a small farm town. Kentucky doesn’t need a builder, it needs a star and those are few and far in between.

What do you think? Chime in by posting a comment on the blog.

It was a foggy Sunday morning in Charleston, South Carolina. Four white 15 passenger vans rolled into a nearly empty parking lot of an unassuming shopping center. Tucked into one end of the strip mall is a pair of ice rinks and on this particular Sunday morning, two hockey games would be played. This is the story of one of the games and one of the teams.

But lets back up 48 hours earlier. Two of the vans pulled into the parking lot of the Chilled Ponds Ice Facility in Chesapeake, Virginia to load a hockey team for a trip to Charleston to play in the South East Junior Hockey League’s end of season tournament. The Hampton Roads Junior Whalers Green team had a seven hour drive in front of them.

Their bother team, The Hampton Roads Junior Whalers Blue team had to leave the night before as they had a 5pm game Friday night. The Green team got a morning skate in before they packed up and left a couple of hours later.

Their destination was the Carolina Ice Palace. The top two teams from the tournament would join regular season champions, the Atlanta Knights in Marlborough, Massachusetts in two weeks to participate in the USA Hockey Tier III National Championships. “Three Wins and your In” was the motto of the Green team as they headed down I-95.

At the same time parents, family and friends were packing up their cars to make their journey to watch this end of season tournament. It would be one of the best parental showings of the year for these men between 14 and 21 years of age. Some traveled from as far away as Louisville, Kentucky and West Palm Beach, Florida to cheer their players on.

Text messages from the parents already at the rink were sent to the players on the road to keep the players updated on the progress of the Blue Team’s game. The two teams had not officially played each other during the regular season, but their league records were nearly identical and their scrimmages were split. Either of these two teams could come out of this with a bid to nationals and there was a chance they both could.

After the Green team checked into the hotel and got dinner, most of them migrated to the rink to watch the last game of the day. The Tampa Bay Bolts were playing the Space Coast Hurricanes, both teams had come up from central Florida. At the end of regulation, it was tied. After a 5 minute overtime, it was still tied. The Green team had an early 9am game on Saturday and the lateness of this game was becoming a concern. Surely the ensuing shoot out would be over quickly and they could get back to the hotel. A long shootout took place, going 15 shooters per team deep. Finally a team had an advantage giving the underdog Tampa team the win, effectively eliminating the Hurricanes. The Green team headed to their hotel to get some sleep before their 6:30am wake-up call the next morning.

“Three Wins”

The Whalers would need to win their two round-robin games and win their semi-final game to qualify for nationals. They would not need to win the championship game. Just three wins.

First up was the Tampa Bay Bolts. The Whalers Green team quickly dispatched them 10-2.

With many thanks to the Davies family, the boys were treated to a cookout for a post game lunch. The Davies were staying at a Residence Inn next to the rink, which had a large gas grill in the pool area and some 40 hamburgers, 40 hot dogs and 2 boxes of chicken later, the boys were fed and playing pickup basketball on the adjacent court.

But for one player, Billy Varley, basketball wasn’t his post meal entertainment. It was Billy’s birthday. His mother surprised him with a belly dancer who performed for him. It was pretty clear the boys were having a good time.

A post meal nap was scheduled before the boys had to be back for their 8pm match-up against Space Coast. Two junior hockey games in a given day is taxing to the body. Space Coast had nearly 20 hours to rest between games, the Whalers less than 8.

Everyone was nervous going into this game. Though the Green team was 2 and 0 against Space Coast for the year, the games were reasonably close and in their last meeting a major brawl broke out after the game. Would there be any bad blood?

“Two Wins”

The game started out hard hitting. It was clear these teams did not like each other and that Space Coast was here to extend their season. The teams went to the locker room with the Whalers up 1-0 at the end of the first period. The second period started up with more hitting. But starting 5 minutes into the period and over a period of the next 7 minutes, it was “Good Night Sally, See ya” as the Whalers effectively ended the game. The Whalers found the net 3 more times to end the game 8-0 putting the Green Team into top seed in their bracket going into Sunday.

Earlier the Blue team gave the East Coast Eagles Majors a tight game, but the Eagles prevailed to take the number one seed in their bracket. This setup a match-up between the Whalers Green and the Whalers Blue team in their first official meeting of the year.

With the top two teams getting bids to the nationals, the winner of the Blue-Green game would get a bid, the other’s season would be over. The other semi-match-up pitted Tampa Bay against the Eagles Majors which the Eagles would easily win. The championship game only mattered for seeding in the nationals.

“One Game”

The season was on the line. This had the billing to be a very good hockey game.

Five minutes in, Nate Atangan put the green team ahead. Ten minutes later, Chris Armand, for the Blue team tied the game. It was a hard hitting fast paced game. The Blue team climbed to a 3-1 lead on goals from Barron Sluder and Michael DePatto in back to back goals within 35 seconds half way through the 2nd period. The Green team would not go easily. Atangan picked up a short handed goal to narrow the deficit to one at the 7:32 mark. Four minutes later, Brandon Rumble scored an unassisted goal to knot the game at 3-3. Just before the period expired, Alex Byrne scored to give the Green team a 1 goal lead going into the 3rd period.

Two minutes into the 3rd Period Brandon Rumble gave the Green team the most dangerous lead in hockey . . . a 2 goal lead. The game moved back and forth until a 5 minute major penalty put the Green team on a power play that would consume most of the remaining 3rd period. The Blue team killed it off and with about 2:00 left, the Green team took a penalty that gave the Blue team some life. With the goalie pulled giving the blue team a 6-4 man advantage brought the game to a 5-4 score just after the penalty expired with 11 seconds left on the clock. The Green team killed the last 11 seconds. Joy was on one end of the rink, sorrow and sadness on the other.

In a great show of sportsmanship, instead of shaking hands, the players were all hugging each other. This was extra special since the referees were not allowing post game handshakes in many of the games. To see these guys being so emotional to each other after such a hard fought game was amazing.

The sun was out. The fog has been burned away. It was a glorious day for the Green team.

From the beginning of the year, the Green team was focused on making it to the Nationals. Instead of “We’re going to Disney World” the chant was “We’re going to Natties”.

The team headed to Hooters to celebrate achieving their season goal. More birthday embarrassment for Varley and the captains were forced into doing the hula-hoop.

There was another game to be played and congratulations to the East Coast Eagles Majors on their bid. It was an amazing weekend for the boys. They happily piled into their van’s for their seven hour drive home knowing their season was extended as they were:

Going to Nationals!

Its time for the NCAA‘s Big Dance and time for Billie Gillispie to dance out of Lexington.

“March Madness” is a wonderful time of year for sports geeks.   This week, hundreds of thousands of people will be filling our their “Brackets”, studying records, trash talking their friends as they all enjoy four weeks of basketball tournaments.

The first week has just finishing up as each conference plays out their conference tournaments.  For some conferences they will get to send only one team to the 65 team national tournament so winning your end of season conference tournament is their only way to the show.  Other conferences, primarily those of the bigger schools will get to send multiple teams to the tournament so their best teams, win or loose, still get to play.

And of course some teams are always expected to be there, such as Kentucky.  Its been 17 years since Kentucky last failed to make it to the NCAA tournament.  That was their probation year, a time most Kentucky fans would like to forget.  It ended the Eddie Sutton era, leaving the program with a NCAA death sentence for violating recruiting rules.  But on the other hand, it meant the beginning of the Rick Pitino era which brought the Wildcat’s back to national prominence.

But Kentucky’s record would have gotten them into the tournament that year, had they been eligible.  You have to go back to 1979, 30 years ago to find the last time they missed the tournament on their record.

Thats a pretty good showing.  There are a lot of schools who would love to have Kentucky’s dominance.  But as most people know, the Wildcats have been on a downward slope and are at risk of allowing the UNC Tar Heel‘s to claim the most all time wins.

This slide started when Rick Pitino left Lexington to go back to the pros.  Kentucky hired Tubby Smith to replace Pitino and Kentucky won a national championship.  Of course it was a team of Pitino recruited players.  Smith was allowed to explore other opportunities in 2007 and was replaced by Billie Gillispie.

Most Kentucky fans had been calling for Tubby to be dismissed for several years when it became apparent that he was not recruiting the level of talent to keep Kentucky at the top of college basketball but they were still making “the show”.

Gillispie had shown an ability at Texas A&M to bring a program in trouble back to life and this is what made him an attractive coach to Kentucky.

But Kentucky needed more than a turn around.  It needed an image recovery.  College basketball success is based a lot on recruiting the best talent.  The best talent goes to schools who are always the best.  But with the downward spiral, the best recruits were not choosing Kentucky.  There was hope that Gillispie would be able to do this.  But he hasn’t.

Most of you might be saying, its just his 2nd year and he’s still dealing with a lot of Tubby players.  True that, but he’s not got the clout to get the big recruits.  He’s not been able to manage his talent well and now unless there is some grace of the NCAA bracket gods, Kentucky will be not be going to the big dance.

UPDATE: The basketball gods did not shine on Lexington and UK did not make the 65 team field. Is it too much to ask for UK Basketball to be in the top 65 teams in the country?

Are we to the point where Gillispie needs his walking papers?  In most cases, no, two years isn’t enough time to do anything.  But this isn’t most cases.  This is Kentucky.  They need a big time coach with a big reputation that can get the caliber of players necessary to dominate.  I don’t know who that is but the powers that be in Lexington need to be giving a serious look if they want to remain the Mecca of College Basketball.

Billy, you’re a nice guy and I believe there are a lot of colleges where you could do a great job.  Kentucky isn’t right for you.  Lets recognize this and get you to a school where you can be successful and get a coach in at Kentucky who can be what Kentucky needs.

A lot of people get laughs from CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” where an apartment full of “geeks” have their adventures with their neighbor, an attractive “normal” woman. Stereotypes aside (the geeks are portrayed as nerds, the woman a blond), the show does have a lot of good wit based around geeks fascination with speaking in tech and precision.

For instance in this weeks episode, Sheldon, the super genius astrophysicist is trying to describe to Penny, the normal, how to open a Chinese Puzzle Box. “Move the top panel 2 millimeters to the left, then move the side panel 4mm to the right (or some such very precise measurements)” Sheldon instructed over a phone. Penny frustrated by the geek speak asked if he was attached to the box and when Sheldon said “No”. She stomped the box to open it.

It was a funny moment with geeks and normals laughing at the scenario but its a perfect example of the communication barrier often faced by people when there is a huge separation in IQ.

The classic example of this was Albert Einstein. Even among his peers, his ability to understand physics was so far advanced, most people in the physics community dismissed them. It would take years before physicists would come to embrace his work.

Why does this communication break down?

The main reason for this is that most geek’s enjoy science and science is about accuracy and precision of measurements. There is an old saying:

When cutting a log, measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an Axe

In this case if you’re going to cut the log with a very imprecise tool like an axe, why are you measuring to millimeter accuracy? Because thats what scientists do: They measure accurately.

True Story: My wife (a Normal) and I were heading home from work. She was driving. My son called and asked when we would be home. My response was “We will be there in 97 seconds.” Sherry goes “Where did you pull that pile of stuff from?” I responded thats how long it will take for us to get home. 97 seconds later, she had stopped in the drive. 97 seconds is very precise but most people are not used to hearing that. “A couple of minutes” would have gone over much better with her. She still shakes her head at me when I come up with these seemingly random responses.

The Planes of Thought

NOTE: The following are my original thoughts and will come off as pure BS, buyer beware, Copyright © 2002-2009 Rob Miracle, All Right Reserved, Trade Mark, Patent Pending

Imagine a world where there are different Planes of Thought. These planes are where the mass of the population’s “smarts” are currently massed. Generations of people are smarter than their previous generation. For instance today, we have cell phones and text messages and we can use the Internet and you know what a mouse is and how to use it.

But go back 100 years to 1909 when we were amazed that a buggy could run without a horse, discussions of your mouse and your USB Key or your DVR would make you almost incommunicable with the people of that time. Yet they were as a population considerably smarter than those around in 1809 when the idea of communicating to distant cities with a telephone would be near magic.

This is demonstrated by Arthur C. Clarke’s quote:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If we look at each of these era’s as a plane, there will always be one above where we are now and the past era’s planes below us.

People on one plane cannot effectively communicate with someone on another plane. The tech speak, the new words that come into the vocabulary, etc. make this communications hard.

Of course basic communications, like “Hello Grandma, how are you?” will work, but the more complex vocabulary hinders effectiveness and its frustrating on both sides.

Because it takes time for scientific language to become common language, those that talk in geek speak tend to be on these other planes. Eventually society as a whole will catch up.

Ladders

In addition to imagining the planes, you also have to imagine a series of ladders that connect the two planes. Some people live on these ladders. If they climb to the top, they pass to the higher plane and can no longer effectivally communicate back to the lower plane. People who are climbing the ladders exist in both planes at the same time and can reasonably communicate in either direction.

Back to the “Big Bang Theory” example. Sheldon and Penny can’t understand why the other one does or says the things they do. But Sheldon’s roommate Lenoard is on a ladder and is a bridge between the two. He can explain Sheldon to Penny and Penny to Sheldon.

A Joke!

A helicopter pilot was giving a ride to a businessman in the Seattle area when a heavy fog set in and they couldn’t figure out how to get back to the airport. The pilot spots an office building with workers in the windows and he hovers into place. After getting their attention he asks “Where am I?”. A worker yells back “Your in a Helicopter”. The pilot says thank you and flies away saying he knows where he is now. The businessman has a stunned look on your face and asks the pilot “How do you know where we are?” The pilot responds: “we are over Microsoft’s campus. They gave me a technically correct but utterly useless answer.”

That’s one of my favorite jokes, not just because it disses Microsoft but it points out the communication problem. Because geeks tend to be precise, they don’t think in generalities. In this case the pilot would assume he would get the answer of Redmond or Microsoft’s Campus and had he been talking to non-geeks, he would have gotten a general answer to his question.

This precision is part of what forms the barrier between the layers. Its also the reason geeks tend to migrate to computers, even at an early age. Computers are very simple devices but they are very precise. In fact, they may be the ultimate in precision since they only understand “Yes” and “No”. There are no maybes to a computer.

While geeks tend to be slobs and not care much about personal appearance, they are actually very well ordered thinkers. Much like computers which process things in a logical manner, geeks seek logic in things. I’ve always thought my quest to see logic in things had to do with watching too much Star Trek as a kid and a fascination with “Mr. Spock”. Geeks see things in our world that make no sense to them and they spend considerable mental energy to solve the problem or write it of as non-important. This is were the slob nature comes in. Its not important so geeks spend no time on it.

Between their scientific vocabulary, their logical thought process and their need for precision there will always be a rift between geeks and normals. Eventually the normals will ascend to the next plane but when they get there, they will find the geeks have also ascended to yet another plane continuing the cycle.

We’ve all heard the description of this basketball rivalry.  Two teams who in recent years seem to stay at the top of the college basketball pack live a mere 9 miles apart and is considered to be the best rivalry in all of college basketball.  They play each other twice during the year with a potential 3rd meeting in the ACC playoffs and a possible 4th run-in during the NCAA championship.

But today at the Dean Dome (Dean Smith Center named after the Evil Overlord himself — remember I’m a Kentucky fan!) the powder blue clad Tar Heels host the Blue Devils or as they are known affectionately as the “dookies”.   Today’s game will determine who wins the ACC regular season title.  This title doesn’t mean much other than seeding for the ACC tournament later this week.

In an interesting twist, because of the ACC’s quest to be a football conference and the growth to accommodate their BCS dreams, all basketball teams do not play each other twice during the season.  This has created some very interesting scenarios for the sports geek to ponder with the ACC Tie breaking system.

If UNC wins today, they win out right, two games head of Duke.  Duke is a game behind UNC going into today’s contest and if Duke wins, they will be tied since they have split their head-to-head match ups.  The tie breaking scheme is basically one of looking at head-to-head match-ups until one of the teams has an advantage.

The process is complex and given that I don’t give a squat about the ACC or its member teams, I’m not going to delve into it any further than saying today’s game should be a good one with the title on the line. If you’re interested in more details go see this forum post.

Now Kentucky has struggled and as much as I like Billy Gillespie, the coach, they are on the outside looking in at the moment and may not make the NCAA tournament.   If I were writing the contract for the coach as Kentucky, this would be a reason to fire clause.  The other two are never loose to Tennessee or Vanderbilt.  But I’m not the AD, so I don’t get my say in these matters.

At the end of the day, UNC will probably gain another 4-6 wins on Kentucky before the season is out, halving the lead the Wildcats have.    Therefore I need Duke to win today.

So why for the life of me, when I went to get a glass for ice water this morning and I was looking at a plastic cup did I make the conscious decision to choose a baby blue cup from a UNC game over one from a Carolina Hurricanes game?

Am I loosing it?  Could I actually start liking UNC?  Or is it a case that I really loath Duke and UNC is the lesser of the two evils?  Why am I so tortured by this? I swore when I moved to NC that I would not become a NASCAR fan and well hell would freeze over before I ever cheered for an ACC school.

I’m going to watch NASCAR and ponder this….

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I don’t like reality shows for the most part.  I enjoy American Idol once the final 12 start performing because you hear *some* entertaining music.  But I don’t have time in my life to get involved in them.

Needless to say, “The Bachelor” is probably near the bottom of the rung when it comes to Reality TV for dudes.  Mushy “Rose Ceremonies” in exotic locations that mortals can’t reach are great for women’s dreams.  Its a romance novel on TV.  And you know what, I’m cool with that.  Its something they like.  They are allowed to have their fantasies as long as they don’t complain about my por…, er fantasies…..

So its Monday night, the Mrs. is clipping her coupons and she makes sure to watch “The Bachelor” when its on.  I’m sitting 6′ 4″ away in the other chair with my laptop surfing the net doing my social networking thing and I convert the show to white noise while I’m twittering away about photography to someone.  Its a fairly normal Monday.

But not this Monday.   “Honey, tonight is the last night and you won’t have to put up with ‘The Bachelor’ for a while.”  I replied “Yea, like 4 weeks”.  It was the “After the Final Rose Ceremony” night.  Three straight hours of mega mush, crying, frolicking in New Zealand and some really nerdy emcee saying “the most emotional rose ceremony every”.  Gag me with a pitch fork.  Three hours?  You have to be kidding me.

I manage to kill the 1st two hours by spamming my Twitter fans as I experimented with a Twitter chat of budding and experienced photographers for a blog site (Thats http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/ btw).  The show is to a point where the dude, Jason has dumped the woman who is probably really in love with him, Molly in favor the other woman, Melissa for whatever reason possessed him.

The third hour was dedicated to how things are going between the couple after six weeks.

My wife, and I love her dearly, was nice and realized how much torture this show was handed me the remote and went upstairs to watch the last hour from the bedroom.  This is where it gets embarrassing.

I didn’t change the channel.

I had the remote.  I had the power.  I even shut the computer down.  I watched the last hour on purpose.

Perhaps it wasn’t as much as on purpose as much as the show running as background noise had gelled my brains so the aliens can scoop them out easier with a melon baller.

I had 52″ of wide screen high def Jason with the nerdy emcee blasting me.

Six weeks had elapsed since the final rose ceremony where Jason proposed to Melissa after telling Molly to bugger off because she was 2nd place and well 2nd place as we all know is the 1st looser.

Now of course, this is all taped and the exec’s at ABC along with the nerdy emcee had time to write their promo scripts taunting you with “This show is so emotional out of respect to the participants we chose to film it without a studio audience” so it was obvious something was up.  Of course ABC has to keep mixing things up or the show will become boring (oh what, it is boring.)

Well Jason tells nerdy emcee in the couples six weeks of one-on-one time “Dude, something changed.  I messed up and picked the wrong one.  Its not working out with me and Melissa.  I want to press CTRL-ALT-DELETE and get a do-over.”  Nerdy emcee is eating this up realizing that their ratings are popping through the roof.  (BTW:  The hashtag for our twitter chat was trending higher than the hashtag for the Bachelor for the night!  Take that Nielsen ratings!!!!).

They bring Melissa out and Jason drops the bomb.  “I don’t like you I like the other one and you can go take a joy ride in the limo”.  Supposedly the couple had discussed this over the past six weeks and she should realize things are not working.  Well Melissa seems to have forgotten that and this is all news to her.  She rips Jason a new one and goes for her joy ride.

WTF?

So this is where I have to start getting “involved” with this.  Men have a bad enough reputation with women over commitment.  They know men have trouble committing and here on their grandest stage, Jason didn’t let them down.  He made us ALL look like chumps.   I was shocked.  I shouldn’t have been, we didn’t earn that bad rap without reason, but for ABC to parade that was just wrong.

Then they (predictably) brought Molly out where she sat on the couch listening to the story.  This dude breaks up with his bride to be on national television and a matter of minutes later, he’s telling the women he told to bugger off that he just dumped his choice and wants his do-over with her.  Molly of course has a skeptical “WTF” look on her face.  She looks like she’s about to slap the cooties out of him realizing his level of scumbagness for this move.

Jason then says he wants to hook up with Molly and she pretty much jumps him on set.

WTF?

So now Molly has done to women what Jason just did to all the men.  If guy dumps you for another woman then he comes back crawling and in a half-assed “I’m sorry” she’s all forgiving.  Molly, he dumped you six weeks ago.  You haven’t talked to him or seen him other than watching the TV episodes and in less that 10 minutes you’ve forgiven him and acting like nothing ever happened.  What if he changes his mind and wants to go back to Looser #2 or #3 or some other woman who passes through his life?

This show has to be the worst for male-female relationships.

Oh, the real last hour of the season is on now.  Its another six weeks later.  Who knows were we will be after tonight?

And he needs to turn in his man card for crying on national television!!!  (Thanks to Sherz for that one!)

You know the routine, you open your email in the morning and there is a message that “BillyJean is now following you on Twitter!“. You open up the message and click on the link and a Twitter profile page pops up in your browser followed by that inevitable questions “Should I follow them back?”

I know I ask myself that question several times a day as seemingly random people want to now stalk me and do I really want to stalk them back.

It seems that people who want to follow you fall into several categories:

1. Your real friends (or at least people who think they are your friend)
2. People who find you based on things you’ve posted.
3. Businesses or News sources that your interested in.
4. People who are trying to inflate their follow count.
5. People who are trying to spam you

Obviously you should be excited when your real friends find you and in most cases you will probably follow them back. More on that later. You should be able to recognize your friends and this is really the core of what Twitter is about.

The next group of people are those who watch the public feed or use search.twitter.com or hashtags.org to find tweets that are important to them. For instance during the Daytona 500 a couple of weeks ago, I posted several NASCAR tweets and used the #NASCAR hashtag and within a few hours, I had several new followers. I chose to follow them back.

There are some very good businesses who are taking advantage of Twitter to reach their customers. I once complained about a problem I was having with FireFox and shortly, I got a reply from someone at Mozilla.org with a suggestion on how to solve my problem. Generally, these people may reach out to follow you first in hopes your interested in their information. For example, the pro photo lab that I use is on Twitter, mpix.com. They are good about responding to customer issues and announcing new products, upgraded software, or in a recent case, their 50% off 8×10 prints promotion.

In addition to those hawking a product, there are other useful information sources. I follow several news organizations who post breaking news and others that just want to share information. During the NFL football season I followed @nflscore which posts scores to Twitter as they happen so you can stay up on your favorite team. You can expect that these people probably won’t follow you back or at least they are not reading your tweets.

Then there are people I just don’t get. Its all about getting more followers. Its a popularity game and they will follow just about anyone and hope you follow them back so when they reach 2,000 followers they have reached some level of importance. I personally don’t get these people. Following 3,000 or 4,000 people means you get so many tweets there is no way you can possibly be reading them all, unless that’s all you do, so these people are producing content and not absorbing it, much like the businesses, but their content is generally of low value, other than to say, “I need 10 more follower’s to break a thousand”.

The final class are spammers. These people are clearly there to sell you something and have very little to offer you as far as information or value other than their product.

Now for me, I’m at around 260 followers and I’m following around 260 people and there is a difference of about 40 each way. So I’m following around 40 people who are not following me. Sadly, I found that a bulk of them are co-workers and friends who I thought would reciprocate. A few were not a surprise. I was initially bummed, but given my interests its only logical that they may not be interested in the same thing. Then the other direction, there are about 40 people following me that I don’t follow back and those are mostly people trying to inflate their follow counts or businesses that I may not be interested in, but it doesn’t bother me that they follow me.

So how do you decide who to follow?

Well real friends, you probably should follow. People of shared interest can be worth following and you probably should give them a chance. Of course, the business clients that interest you should follow.

Next, I look to see how frequent someone posts. If I see someone with 3,000 posts, they are probably generating way too much noise.

Next, I look for a huge difference in the number of followers to friends. If someone is following a lot of people and very few are following them, its a good indicator of a spammer. If they don’t have an avatar or if their avatar is bikini-clad and their screen name doesn’t match their URL, you can bet that its a spam account. Not only do I not follow these back, but I block them from seeing my posts as well. Generally Twitter’s spam detectors will pick up on these accounts and cancel them.

If I see a large number of followers and friends, I will look at their posts and see if they are of interest before I decide to follow back. Post frequency is really the determining factor if I’m going to follow back.

Finally, I recently went through my followers and friends to determine who was not reciprocating. I made a decision to unfollow any one who I didn’t know personally who I was following. This helped cut down the noise in my twitter stream.

Thoughts? What decisions to you make when deciding who to follow?