Last year, Leo Laporte became a Twitter quitter.

The host of one of Silicon Valley’s most popular podcasts was none too excited that of all the names in the world, the burgeoning message service had picked one that hit piercingly close to home. The online broadcasting network that Laporte owns and runs out of his house in Petaluma is called TWiT.tv, after his company’s flagship show, “This Week in Tech.â€

The rise of Twitter has long been a favorite topic of conversation on TWiT, and with an audience of around 150,000, Laporte found himself in a strange pickle: The more he talked about Twitter on his show, the more followers he accrued — and the more publicity he gave his brand rival.

“I thought, jeez, I’m building value in this company that is ultimately vying for my trademark,†he said recently via phone. “So I left.â€

But in spite of his absence, Laporte still became the most-followed user on the service, beating out front-runners like then-Sen. Barack Obama for the top spot, with more than 30,000 followers. Walking away from a megaphone that big just didn’t seem like good business. So he came back.

“They kind of have you,†said Laporte, who now has more than 100,000 followers on the service. “The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is.â€

Still, being in thrall to Twitter hasn’t stopped Laporte from joining a conversation that’s taking hold on the service’s fringes. As this group of Web subversives sees it, the once-tiny Twitter has grown like a magic beanstalk into a full-fledged communications medium — taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television. And though the 30-person, San Francisco start-up is not exactly General Electric, digital trust-busters believe the same rules apply: One company shouldn’t have a monopoly…

…on an entire medium — even if it invented it.

“Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it,” said Laporte, referring to the tweets users pour into Twitter’s databases every day by the million.

People love the convenience and reach of social media systems like Twitter, he said.  “But what they ignore is that there’s a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what’s going on.”

Dave Winer, a Berkeley-based entrepreneur and Web innovator, sounded a similar note on a recent podcast posted to his Scripting News blog.

“It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,†he said, “not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers — but it also goes through one set of business interests that’s anything but transparent.â€

Danger may sound a bit overzealous for a Web service that barely existed two years ago, but for a media landscape in the middle of a profound shift, two years can be the span between eras.

Twitter is becoming a major source for news, commerce and free expression and, as with a free press itself, defenders don’t want a few profit-motivated individuals making all the decisions about how it should evolve.

Like Facebook and YouTube before it, Twitter is now transitioning from a freely available, much-loved Web service to a well-funded business venture looking to cash in on the audience and cachet it built in its freewheeling early days.

A few weeks ago, Twitter created a page of several dozen suggested users to help newcomers decide whom to follow. If you weren’t sure how to proceed, you can follow CNN, Lance Armstrong or Britney Spears. Being recommended by Twitter, it was quickly discovered, translated into tens or hundreds of thousands of new followers, and anointed accounts have since shot to the top of the Twitter hierarchy. The giant, instant audiences Twitter bestowed on these select users are thought to be so valuable that Web businessman Jason Calacanis offered Twitter $250,000 for a two-year ride on the list.

As visibility and influence gets funneled upward to the companies, celebrities and politicians that already have plenty of both, Twitter risks inviting a comparison to the overinflated economy — it’s creating a bubble at the top, and potentially alienating regular users who labored to build their audiences over months or years.

Well-known tech figures like Laporte and Winer don’t exactly represent the voiceless online rabble, but neither are they the types of guys you want leading a charge against you.

Winer recently wrote a post called “Why it’s time to break out of Twitter,†where he said of the service’s management, “we need to get that power out of their hands.†Laporte told me, “I’m more interested in seeing if we can go beyond Twitter — a more open system would be a better system.â€

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There’s Twitter the company, and twitter the medium | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

Generally, the goal of public relations is to create or manage a buzz around a business, product, service, brand or individual. According to Wikipedia, “public relations is the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics.” With the emergence of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn, businesses have almost unlimited access to the public. In order for PR to successfully manage the tide of information, PR representatives must venture beyond traditional media outlets to Web 2.0 in order to monitor all messages. In fact, social media management should be an integral piece of your public relations campaign.

Through social media management, a PR pro can help businesses interact with clients, customers and prospects to increase brand awareness and direct traffic to the desired website. A channel like Twitter allows your business to engage with customers, other industry leaders and the media to grow your list of followers and update them on your latest company news. Another top networking site and PR opportunity is LinkedIn. Through discussion forums and queries regarding a particular industry, you can be positioned as an expert. A high level of involvement online improves brand/business recognition and gives search engines and crawlers extra opportunities to find you and place you higher on search engine rankings. Regardless of which sites you use to increase your exposure (or your clients’), below are five ways to get the most out of social media as part of your public relations strategy.

5 Ways to Integrate Social Media with Public Relations | SocialComputingMagazine.com.

As the recession rapidly sucks the momentum out of Web 2.0′s heyday, with it may go one of the era’s most defining terms: the job title “social media expert.”

For the past few years, people who identify with that title–as well as social media consultants, social media strategists, and social media marketers, depending on what they want to call it–have been unavoidable in the Web 2.0 social scene. You’d meet them at the endless litany of industry cocktail parties, at Tech Meetup events on both coasts, and at the likes of the Web 2.0 Expo. A search for “social media expert” on business networking site LinkedIn yields 175 results. “Social media consultant” yields nearly 400, and “social media strategist” about 300. Read More on CNET