During Mike Masnick’s terrific keynote during mesh, something that grabbed my attention was something he said about Twitter becoming a tool to receive curated content. For example, he’s following someone who’s an expert on copyright, and provides a steady stream of interesting information on stories related to the topic.

Masnick’s take on Twitter resonated with me because it’s exactly where I see the real power of Twitter. While Twitter is certainly great way to connect with people, it’s been a personal online game-changer as a way to access great content that I would have never likely seen.

In many ways, Twitter has become a way to build an effective and interesting team of personal content curators, who comb the Web for interesting, insightful, valuable and entertaining content. Then, my curators deliver this great content in a streamlined package (aka Twitter). In tandem with Techmeme, Hacker News and Filtrbox, I’ve created a small, but effective, set of curation tools.

Twitter’s role as a content curator affects how I use Twitter. It means that adding followers is a methodical process that takes time and effort. Rather than simply following people who follow me, I look at each person, their updates and profiles to see if they’ve got what it takes to join the curation team. I’m looking for people who feature links to content as well as interesting personal insight.

If this approach has any weaknesses, there needs to be a more diversified view of the world. While obviously heavy on technology, I’m looking for some good politics, business and media curators. If you know of anyone who fits the bill, please send them along.

More: You can see Masnick’s keynote on meshTV.

Technorati Tags: mike masnick, social media, twitter

A couple of years ago, Twitter exploded onto the scene during the SXSW conference a couple of years ago, it added a new and exciting wrinkle where people could have an active backchannel about what was happening on and off stage.

During the first day of mesh yesterday, the use of Twitter during a conference took a new and interesting twist as a way to handle Q&A. As a way to solicit questions from the audience during our keynotes (Mike Masnick, Jessica Jackley), we asked attendees to send their questions using the hashtag #askmesh.

It was an interesting way to pull questions in a large venue when some people may be reluctant to raise their hands and stand up. The questions via Twitter started to flow in, letting us pick and choose the most interesting ones. All in all, it worked really well.

What we learned, however, was #askmesh didn’t work as well during the panels when there were fewer people. In a more intimate setting in which asking a question lets attendees connect with panelists, the use of Twitter seemed to de-personalize things.

It was funny, for example, to pull a question from Twitter, only to discover the person who sent it in was sitting behind the person on the laptop handling #askmesh. And when panelists were answering #askmesh questions, they didn’t know whether to talk to someone in the audience or the person processing the #askmesh questions.

One thing I wondered about is whether you could do a panel without a moderator by using Twitter as your Q&A mechanism. The questions from the audience would appear on a large screen, and the panelists could pick the most interesting questions or perhaps the questions that trended the biggest.

Technorati Tags: mesh, meshU, twitter