I was really jazzed over the holidays about the number of new followers we are getting on the Earth911 Twitter account. I am carefully following everybody back, especially if the have a handle that indicates their interest in recycling, being green, or the environment.

Then I find out accidentally (in one of those coincidences of life that you can’t explain the ins and outs of) that Earth911 is one of the Twitter accounts listed in something called Autopack. According to my friend Rafe Needleman, who posted to CNet about it, Autopack is

an offshoot of wiki-based Twitter directory called Twitter Pack. AutoPack is a long list of Twitter user accounts broken into categories (such as Quotations, Lawyers, and Green Building). The directory itself is incomplete, but what’s cool is that you can sign up for everyone in a category at once. This is the way signing up to follow Twitter users should be: find a flock, and sign up to all the cool people in it. Otherwise you’ll just end up following a piece of the general conversation. I’d like to see this concept developed further, and as I said, the directory content itself needs work.

It definitely needs work. We are listed under Green Building. But there are about five green and sustainable categories, and I’d bet that’s how people are finding us.

The article was dated yesterday, and that’s why I’ve been wildly following people back all morning! Rafe, you have a big audience.

This is wonderful, because it solves two problems simultaneously: the first is how to find the people who really want to follow Earth911 because they are interested in product stewardship and recycling and second, how to eliminate the extraneous conversations in the Twitter stream so that we and our followers are sharing valuable content.