Interesting Times

When will they stop, all those insistent tweets linked to advice-giving sites? All those sites hungry for clicks, all of them helpfully suggesting that folks should be interesting if the want to be successful on Twitter? They’re as predictable as Chelsea Clinton marrying a hedge fund manager.

What does ‘interesting’ mean, anyway? How do you define interesting? The people seen as interesting in the brave new webworld tend to be the types giving away news about techie developments which is frankly only interesting to a vocal minority.

When I tweeted that Kanye West was following one man from England it was deemed interesting, briefly at least, but few have the capacity to formulate an effective online presence beyond the confines of same-as-the-next-man. Do you try being witty? Wit doesn’t get picked up in America – in fact, I defy anyone to find a really good example of online American wit. Humour, interest and subject matter often get held up at international borders or lost in transit.

The blunt truth is that the people who get retweeted most tend to be those who say you must be interesting without giving a concrete explanation of what interesting actually means; the ones with the killer search engine optimisation skills but little or nothing to actually say.