How Might Health Insurers Respond to Medical Loss Ratio Regulation? -- Seeking Alpha

As Washington continues to micro-manage various industries via royal decree, it is becoming increasingly evident that Congress is afflicted by some combination of the following conditions:

1. Ignorance of industry specific business models
2. An inability to read financial statements
3. Willful disregard of #s 1 and 2
4. Delusions of grandeur

via seekingalpha.com

Whether or not you agree with the sentiment on this particular issue (health reform), I think you'll agree that the writing is awfully good - and funny. Carneades, I salute you.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

MentionMap's Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations

I'm a big fan of social network analysis as a means to understand the connection between individuals and groups ... especially if those networks can be visualized in helpful ways. My friend Mathias Kolehmainen (the guy who actually built the Tweet Positioning System) turned me on to this site today, and I was blown away.

MentionMap is a living visualization of your twitter network, showing the connection between you and the individuals with whom you interact, and even the hashtags you use. I can guarantee that you'll learn something about your network - and the mesh of connections it contains - that you didn't know. For example, I didn't know that Chris Hall had connected to Fran Melmed ... Chris and I work together; Fran and I are going to be hosting a TweetChat together. Amazing. Check out MentionMap to see what you can learn from your network ... and let me know what other great network visualization tools you love. I want more!

Edelman hires Armano; sees spike in Twitter reaction

via flickr.com

One of the things I love about TPS (the Tweet Positioning System) is that you can get a sense of trending topics really easily. A nice example is happening now ...

Last night, David Armano (a true Twitter celebrity with over 22,000 followers) announced that he would be joining Edelman Digital as a senior vice president. At that point, the search term "Edelman," which was toddling along at 50-100 tweets per day, shot up to over 1,000. [You can see it yourself, here http://crumpleitup.com/tps/searches/show/2891].

It's also pretty neat to be able to see where those tweets are coming from; I zoomed my map over to Europe and found conversation happening in places as diverse as Austria, Turkey, Moldova and Sweden.

Where are people talking about you and your business? And are you measuring to see what can make that conversation accelerate? I'd love to have you check out TPS and let me know what you think; it's been a boon for our business, but I'd like to see how it might impact yours.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

LinkedIn Premium - why so expensive?

I am a big fan of LinkedIn.  I've been using it for years, and have gotten more and more value from the connections I've made using it.  But I confess to being a little puzzled about their premium memberships.  For those of you who are unaware, anyone can use LinkedIn for free, as a tool to connect with people they know either personally or professionally.  Most people consider it to be something like "the professional version of facebook."  And most companies will allow employees to access it from inside their firewalls (even mine, which blocks such evil sites as Google Documents). 

The free version of LinkedIn allows you to connect to people you know ... and a circuitous way to connect to people you don't.  That's all well and good.  But the premium versions allow you to do much more ... things like organizing profiles, reaching out to people outside your network, seeing who's searched for and viewed your profile, etc.  They seem to think that they only people who'd be interested in more than the free version are recruiters, who would be willing to pay the $24.95, $49.95 or $499.95 per month they charge for that increased level of access.

But what about the individual networkers, who want to access at least some of that functionality on their own?  It's clearly time for an upgraded individual subscription to LinkedIn, for some reasonable amount ... $14.95 per year, or $1.99 per month or something like that.  What do you think?  Would you pay for enhanced access to LinkedIn?  What's it worth to you?

Greg Matthews 

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

TPS Search of the Day

I'm a regular participant in a wonderful online group called HealthCareSocialMedia, or HealthSocMed for short. I've gotten to know many of the participants pretty well - although I've met only one in person. This group is what's known as a "TweetChat" - a group that uses Twitter as a meeting tool. Check out my blog post on Twitter, Social Media and Healthcare for more information on how and why TweetChats are interesting and valuable.

Anyway, one of the rules of the group (actually I think it may be the only rule) is that you're not allowed to pitch your products in the meetings. I have to confess that I kinda broke that rule just now ... by introducing the group to the Tweet Positioning System, and showing the folks where we were all tweeting from. The novelty of it seemed to keep anyone from getting too upset.
So what are you interested in? Who's talking about it, and where do they live? Get out to the TweetPositioningSystem and check it out!

21st Century American Art

It is my opinion - nay, belief - that Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine represents the apex of American art in the dawning 21st century. It's even begun to be referenced among its competition - today by the brilliant Bill Amend of Foxtrot:

Greg Matthews

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

TPS Search of the day - guess where people are talking about Indiana Basketball?

If you guessed, "Indiana," YOU'RE RIGHT! Although there are a few conversations out of state, the hoosier state is primarily talking about itself.

How about you ... what are the things that interest you? Try running a search on TPS and saving it over time ... you might be surprised what you find.