O Reilly and Twitter credo #140conf: So I try to restrict the amount of O'Reilly content.

And, instead, I say, "How can I actually start to build the team, the people who I follow?" So I say gosh, if you're interested in venture capital, follow Fred Wilson. So I retweet Fred. If you're interested in the financial crisis, follow Paul Kedrosky. So I retweet Paul. If you want to follow energy, follow Chris Nelder, @nelderini. And so I retweet him. What I'm effectively doing is, I'm building a team. And I'm actually handing out assists. If you think of me, I'm a little bit like a point guard in basketball.

I'm trying to identify the best people in a community of whom I'm following, and I try to use my tweets to build their following so that the news I care about gets broadcast more widely.

Because I can't retweet everything they do, but I want to make sure that they're in the rotation; that they get the ball. And so in some sense, I'm trying to become the voice of the communities that I care about and to find an audience that cares about me, not about me, sorry -- about the same things that I do.

And I think that [is] one of the lessons here for anybody involved in Twitter, and particularly anybody who's thinking that Twitter is going to lead them to the next media empire. You see these people saying, "I could have millions of followers and have such an impact." That's really not the point. The point is to figure out how you can add value to the community that you're a part of. That's really the secret of social media. It's about amplifying a community.

There's a great example of this in some social network analysis that was done of congressional Twitterers. I forget who did it, but it was somebody in the UK. And they found that a relatively obscure Texas congressman named John Culberson is the central node in the congressional Twitter network. Now why is that? Turns out he's the guy who engages in the most conversations. He responds to his fellow congress people versus the ones who just broadcast themselves. And it was kind of interesting, I went to see Culberson. Politically, we're incredibly far apart. I'm quite liberal, Democrat in many ways. And he's an amazing Jeffersonian Republican. But I really warmed to the guy. We started talking, and we just had this immediate mind meld. I saw the connection between what he does and how he does it and Jefferson's vision of America. He waved under my nose this letter of Jefferson in which he talked about the delegation of authority between levels of government all the way down as it ends up to each man on his own farm. Okay. Well, we're not each on our own farm anymore. But the idea is that each of us matters and there's this nervous system effectively that extends from the center of our government out to each of us. And that our role is to be active synapses in that nervous system I think is central to a vision of how we can remake America and remake the world today.

We have to connect with each other. We have to build on each other. And we have to take the time and the effort to weave a community of people with common interests. We have to take the time to build up the people who we care about. I use a phrase at O'Reilly as a motto, which is, "Create more value than you capture." That is, if you're trying to think of what you do as a media practice, think about it as creating value for your community and eventually that community will create value for you. Thank you very much.