Yesterday, a fellow member of a tribe I'm part of on Triberr posted a message on Twitter saying, "@ahynes1 I notice that you don't approve any of my posts on triberr. Is there a reason for that?" They had sent a similar message to several people in the tribe as well as started a discussion about it on Triberr.

I responded, "The few posts I've seen by you on Triberr did not seem interesting to my audience", to which he replied, "OK I understand. I approve all your stuff whether my audience find it interesting or not. I'll apply the same stadards from now on."

I thanked him for the reply and for changing his approach to tweeting about my blog posts. I don't want people on Triberr tweeting out my posts on a quid pro quo basis. I want them tweeting about my blog posts because they found the blog post interesting and they hope their readers will also find it interesting.

Be a bit of a geek, I like to look at some of the underlying numbers. The person who started this discussion has tweeted about my blog posts several times, but the amount of traffic his tweets have generated have been less than the number of tweets he's posted.

On the other hand, there are some people that have tweeted about my blog posts only about as third as often, but have generated ten times the traffic. Those are the important tweets.

At the same time, if I am more careful about my tweets, my followers on Twitter are more likely to visit the articles I've tweeted about. Even more important, at least to me, is when people Retweet these tweets, or, like them over on Facebook.

When I first joined Triberr, I was very concerned about driving away followers, but by judiciously selecting which posts I highlight, I believe I've done a service to my followers as well as to my fellow tribe members.

When it comes to curation, one of my fellow tribe members is mostly posting indirect links to mainstream stories. Many of them are good links, and I have taken to not approving her posts on Triberr, but instead posting a link to the original story on Twitter and giving her a shout out. In doing this, the Triberr analytics get lost, but it seems like I get a lot of likes on the stories of hers that I've highlighted, so I think everyone is benefiting.

Bottom line: I like Triberr as a tool for finding good articles and curating them. However, I have little use for them in terms of promoting whatever comes across the transom.