Scripting News

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Mon, 18 May 2009 03:22:54 GMT

I screwed up and lost this week's Rebooting The News podcast.

This brief three-minute solo cast explains what happened and expresses apologies to Jay and everyone for this screwup.

Sorry!!

Neutrality in different contexts

Sun, 17 May 2009 22:03:05 GMT

1. In our world we call it net neutrality. It means that all packets are treated equally on the Internet.

2. Among journos, it's the distinction betw editorial and publishing functions, what's often referred to as a Chinese Wall.

In the tech press, back when there was such a thing, they'd sometimes send an ad sales person to visit along with the editor in chief. The editor excuses himself to go to the bathroom, the sales guy says "If you buy an ad he'll review the product." Even if they don't come out and say it, it's often understood. It also becomes obvious to the readers that this is going on, so they stop believing the reviews. It's likely it happens in areas businesses, like movie reviews.

3. In government, it's the separation of church and state. This is one of the ways freedom of religion is guaranteed. If there was a state religion, one which was part of the government, people of different faiths, or ones who don't practice any religion, would have less rights. When someone says the US is a "Christian nation" they're saying they don't believe in this separation.

4. At Microsoft they claimed to keep the systems and apps divisions separate. This became a farce when they claimed that the web browser was part of the system software, when it was clearly an app. This is how they justified their plan to suck the web into Windows.

5. You don't want your Internet Service Provider to also provide your cable TV because they might screw around with BitTorrent to keep you from getting your entertainment on the net, protecting their revenue from cable TV. So they make a promise to keep the two functions separate, and there's a scandal every time they fail to.

6. With Google it means that the search engineers don't talk to the advertising people about fine-tuning their algorithms so the biggest customers get the best results. It's because we believe that Google doesn't screw around that we trust their search.

7. I feel very strongly that this kind of neutrality should be the rule on Twitter, and I also know that it's not the rule. They make no attempt to separate operational and editorial functions. In a way this is very honest of them, but it's also long-term going to be bad for business, as people they don't favor look for other outlets for their creative work.

8. Halliburton got some sweet deals from the Bush Administration because the VP was their CEO until he became VP. Did the VP ever explicitly tell DoD employees to favor Halliburton? He didn't have to, the theory goes, everyone knew where he came from.

This idea that you should keep certain functions separate from others permeates all human activities. It's so important we should have a theory for it, and a name that applies everywhere, so when a new thing comes along, no one need debate whether such separation is necessary or good. Unless somehow humans reinvented human nature, it's always both necessary and good.

This is something I hope to discuss with Jay in this evening's Rebooting The News podcast.

When will Twitter start for real?

Sun, 17 May 2009 14:55:15 GMT

I've got a new way to view Twitter these days, looking at the collected tweets of people who work at two companies: The NY Times and at Twitter itself. I hoped to see cohesion, discussion between people working on projects together. Not yet.

Last night I added an aggregation of the tweets of the Gillmor Gang, a weekly talk-show podcast about the tech industry. And of course there's the first one, the Top 100 most subscribed to twitterers.

Now it's still really early in all of these feeds, but then that's how we think of Twitter itself. It's still early. It hasn't happened yet, whatever it is we feel is going to happen.

If you look at the tweets, dispassionately, what you'll see is a lot of people broadcasting. There is some shared wisdom, but not much of it is all that useful. One twitterer says you can walk into the wrong gender's bathroom by accident if you're reading tweets while leaving the correct bathroom. Another says he used a line from a movie in a meeting but no one knew what he meant. People wait for taxis, get them or don't get them. Yesterday I went to a ballgame and uploaded a picture.

What will it take for Twitter to advance beyond its potential to be great, to realize its potential? It's been in a holding place, in my experience, for a long time. Last summer we thought first Twitter had to stabilize, stop fail-whaling in order for it to realize its potential. I suppose some thought it would get real when the low-level politicos showed up, then the reporters, then mainstream users, celebs, Oprah.

At some point the potential must be realized. What will it look like then?

Meanwhile, even though some have said blogging was killed by Twitter, or RSS -- I still blog (you're reading a blog post right now) and I get most news from my aggregator. If I depended on Twitter for news it would be very haphazard, completely non-systematic. Today the only real use Twitter has is to explore the potential of a new medium. So far that exploration hasn't turned up much gold. There's the potential of value, that we see.

At some point we will finish this sentence: Twitter is... ?

Following the people of the NYT and Twitter

Sat, 16 May 2009 17:12:01 GMT

I read a really interesting article the other day about the 47 people at Twitter, Inc and thought it would make an interesting aggregate. So I used the same code I had to follow the top-100 most followed people and did one for the 47 people of Twitter. Since it starts on a weekend, most people are doing home and family things, or not tweeting at all. It'll be interesting to see how it picks up on Monday.

The New York Times seems to operate at all hours. We aggregate the tweets of the people of the Times -- what they're talking about; as opposed to the stories they've written.

Both of the new feeds are interesting, as is the original:

1. http://nyt.100twt.com/

2. http://twitter.100twt.com/

3. http://100twt.com/

I'm open to doing others if people have ideas.

Friday night, I'm playing with Wolfram Alpha

Sat, 16 May 2009 05:38:57 GMT

Okay, I need to get a life.

In the meantime here are some searches I did with Alpha.

1. The obvious vanity search.

2. A common expletive phrase.

3. Ooops it doesn't know what RSS is.

4. Madison, Wisconsin.

5. A favorite movie.

6. A recent movie.

7. Its inventor.

8. A relative. A contemporary. A great old movie.

9. A word I looked up on Google yesterday. (Very good!)

10. The cosine of 1204. (Something it does very well that I never need.)

11. A breed of dog. (It thinks it's a chemical.)

Tech heroes who blog?

Fri, 15 May 2009 15:03:47 GMT

Yesterday I asked who are your tech heroes. Please read the description for what I mean as a hero. Now today I'd like to ask a slightly different question.

I want to know about people who are active in technology who also blog whose integrity you trust.

I'm not looking for journalists who have a blog who write about technology, so even though I admire Marshall Kirkpatrick or Om Malik (only two examples, there are many more) they're not who I'm looking for.

I'm looking for people who might be thought of as sources for reporters who have gone direct.

This is not an idle question -- it's for a project I'm working on with a few other people. My job is to find some of these sources, people of integrity who write publicly about what they believe. The area I've been assigned to cover is tech.

Sources go direct

Fri, 15 May 2009 14:13:51 GMT

I read this morning that the NY Times will decide by the end of June how to generate more revenue from its online presence.

The two choices, they say, are: 1. Metering and 2. Membership. Metering is complicated, but boils down to a new rule -- you can use the site for free for a while, then you have to pay. Membership is like NPR membership. They ask for donations, if you like the service, you give them money. You might get a coffee mug or tote bag.

My opinion: They shouldn't do #1, it would screw everything up, and they might as well try #2, it will raise some money, but not enough, not until they inspire people with new ideas. (Make note, this inspiration is hugely important, and not impossible.)

I do think I know how this will shake out, but I don't have time this morning to explain in detail why. You'll find plenty of pieces in the archive of scripting.com that back these ideas up. I can't prove that they'll work, but I'm pretty sure they will. But they will require the Times to give up one of its sacred tenets. And that won't go down easy. But I believe the quality and integrity of the product will soar as a result. But change is hard.

First some premises:

1. People want more news, faster.

2. The news industry has been cutting back.

3. Even so, news still happens.

4. Believe it or not, the tech industry doesn't know how to deliver news on the Internet. (Caveat: It's getting there.)

5. This creates a vacuum that is being filled by what some call "User Generated Content." I don't like that term. Instead, I call it "Sources Go Direct." Same idea, but with more respect and emphasis on quality. Sure, some of the stuff you read online is crap, but some of it is the quality stuff we crave.

Now what is the Times? Here's what I think it is.

It's a somewhat tarnished brand that equates in people's minds to "The Best in Journalism." It's not the printing press, the trucks, or even the editors and reporters. It is the logo and the tradition, the history. Whatever the Times does, it must not diminish the value of the brand, it must enhance it. The challenge is to tap into the enormous potential of the Internet as a news creation and delivery system.

Like it or not, and some Times reporters appear not to like it -- much of the value in the Times is captured by its sources. The reporters, when they're doing their best work, are facilitating the flow of ideas and information from sources to readers. And don't miss that the flow works the other way too, from readers back to sources. The newspapers have been complaining wildly about this, they say the bloggers get their ideas from news people. And who do you think the news people get their ideas from? And the truth is that a lot of the bloggers they don't like are also sources.

To understand how news works, you need to visualize a flow diagram that includes all the elements of the news process. All the people, not just the reporters and editors. That's where the growth is going to come from.

So basically the Times must evolve, just a little, to see their sources not just as quotes, but also as reporters with a beat -- their expertise. There's still enough shine in the Times rep that people could be enticed to write for the Times, for a fraction of what a reporter makes. Not for free, they must share in whatever revenue the Times gets from their work. But the Times is entitled to a cut, we want the Times to get a cut, because we want this system to go forward. Remember when I said inspiration was going to be key to it, this is how you build it. By showing people how you are going to lead us to the future. So far, I hate to say it, but the news industry has been a huge stick in the mud when it comes to the future. Just getting rid of the drag would be enough to get us to open our wallets, a bit. But imagine if the news industry decided that news was exciting again! That would do a lot to inspire people.

Basically, we're not going to let you fail if we love what you're doing.

And conversely, we're not going to rush to your aid if you're holding us back.

Now I have to get back to work writing some software for this new world.

PS: One more thing. Of course reporters reading this are going to ask "What about me?" Well, you have to find a job that pays a salary and provides the benefits you need. Today there are some jobs for reporters. What skills do you have that a news org might need in a world where sources go direct?

Update: How will we tell deceit from truth?

What's up with the Tumblr API?

Thu, 14 May 2009 22:38:45 GMT

I had set aside today to explore Tumblr's API.

Apparently it was the wrong day because I keep getting HTML in response to my write calls that says: "We're making some changes to our infrastructure and certain pages may be unavailable for a few minutes." This has been going on for many hours! Not gooood.

I looked all over the place to see if there were any notes about this, but haven't found anything. So as a last resort I'm asking here if anyone knows anything about this.

Does anyone know anything about this?

Who are your tech heroes?

Thu, 14 May 2009 18:51:47 GMT

This question came up in a conference call earlier today and I thought it would be useful to open it up publicly.

Here's how to decide:

1. Someone who has made largely selfless contributions to open technology -- i.e. tech that people can reuse without limits or fees. Examples would be BitTorrent or HTTP.

2. Someone who you think would "do the right thing" whatever that is, most of the time. That is, someone you trust.

3. Other criteria?

Caveat: No one is perfect. You're not saying your hero is a saint. Their contribution could have been amends for past mistakes. It should be someone who has made a major contribution without asking for much in return.

The NY Times/Twitter feed

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:34:43 GMT

Today I was thinking about what, in an ideal world, to do with the Twitter feed of the NY Times.

It has 852,709 followers. That's potentially quite powerful.

This is what I came up with.

Think about two communities: 1. The people who use Twitter and those who are likely to use it in the near future. 2. The people who use the NY TImes now and in the near future.

The community you're serving with this feed is the intersection between the two.

The feed should be used to push links to stories that would interest someone in this community. But not just stories from the NY Times.

The criteria would be: Would an informed person want to know about this? And does it fit the Twitter lifestyle of short attention span and retweeting.

"All the news that's fit to print" meets "People come back to places that send them away."

Could be very interesting.

Opting-out of TechMeme

Wed, 13 May 2009 20:57:25 GMT

I appreciate all the flow that TechMeme has sent to scripting.com over the years, but it's time to say a tearful goodbye. I think we'll do better independent of the community that TM defines. It has shifted over time, away from the individual and toward the "corporate blog" -- and I feel better just reading the TechMeme sites, and not participating in the discourse.

So long, and thanks for all the fish! It's been fun.

Lessons from the changes in Twitter

Wed, 13 May 2009 17:51:28 GMT

Interesting changes in the Twitter community in the last 24 hours.

Here's what happened, from my point of view.

1. At some point yesterday afteroon I logged on and saw a message on the Twitter home page advising of a change in the way Reply works. It pointed to the Twitter blog for more info. I clicked on the link, but there was nothing there about Reply. Refreshed the home page and the advisory was gone. I gather most people did not see the advisory.

2. Started seeing comments about the change.

3. A blog post appeared, explaining in confusing terms what had changed.

4. Lots of theories.

5. A reference back to a post by Evan Williams last year, wondering if they shouldn't change the way Reply works.

6. More discussion.

7. It turns out there are technical reasons for the change. We don't know what they are. Biz Stone is surprised at how much interest there is in the change.

Now some comments...

I think the changes are okay, and I don't understand the technical reasons. I inferred that there must be a technical reason for the change, because it would have been simple enough to make it subject to a preference. As was pointed out many times on Twitter, it had been a preference. Therefore the inference.

When communicating with the community, the Twitter folk from now on should assume that every change will be examined in all possible nuance, with all theories explored, very quickly. Therefore, try to say what you know you're going to eventually admit to, as soon as possible. It will help build trust.

None of us outside the company have a clear picture of how the system works behind the user interface, esp since the performance issues were mostly resolved. Why is this feature so expensive? Unknown.

There will be many more problems like this in the future, some not so benign. The danger is that all the functionality of Twitter is centralized.

The centralization problems are in three areas: 1. Technical. 2. Financial. 3. Political.

The technical issues are obvious. If there is no redundancy in their network and a critical component fails, the whole thing goes down. I don't think people really are prepared for how disconnected we all will feel if this happens.

Assume that a change in ownership occurs at some point. What will the new owners change about Twitter. We have some feel for how the current ownership thinks. We obviously have no idea how a potential new owner thinks or what they might choose to sell. They could decide to sell information that we don't want sold.

The political threat is a major concern. Consider the pressure being applied to Craigslist over prostitution by the states attorney generals. What if prostitutes are operating on Twitter? What if a major act of terrorism is organized using Twitter? Would there be pressure to shut it down, or greatly control what it's used for? Remember the atmosphere after 9-11. Not so far-fetched. But it was hard to control the web, it was too diverse. Twitter, which is fully centralized, would be easy for a government to control.

Centralization has its niceties, for sure. They come up every time I warn of its dangers. This change was a very small reminder of what is, if you believe in Murphy's Law, as I do -- certainly in our future if we don't diversify.

Update: A smart look at this by Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW.

Google this is your wakeup call

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:49:45 GMT

I'm reading various reports on Google's announcments about search today, and it sounds scattered and totally uninspiring. And I might add, disappointing.

Google is today a big company, and it seems to lack the resolve to go into middle age with any passion. If ever there was a time to show some exciting new features for search, this was it -- and none of it was in any way exciting.

When Google came along, the CEOs of the existing search companies didn't pay much attention. They probably didn't understand what was so exciting about Google. It was very much like the way the leaders of the minicomputer industry reacted to the early PC, at first dismissive, then with arrogance. Their products seemed to assume they would overcome the challenge, and none of them did. The only one to make the transition was IBM, and then a few years later they would try to lock in the users, and finally lose out to the new companies that had cloned their products.

Twitter is that kind of generational challenge to Google. They have no choice but the same one IBM had with the Apple II, and Microsoft had with Netscape. They must compete, with a respectful product, one that is compatible with Twitter, and gives users a benefit of coming from a strong mature company. The time for this product is passing every week, as Twitter stabilizes and delivers a reliable service. Google's clone should have come out last summer when Twitter was having trouble keeping their servers up.

If I could talk to the management at Google, I would tell them to stop everything, go away for a week, and learn how to use Twitter, yourself. Get an inkling of what is so exciting and different about it. You can't get the gestalt by looking at the features, you have to see how people are using it and who they are. It's not about Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, it's about the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, and a hundred NY Times reporters who are breaking their company's rules by using Twitter the way bloggers were telling them to use the web. Twitter is in many ways the realization of the full promise made by blogging so many years ago. It's really exciting to see it come to fruition, but it's also depressing that it's all happening inside one company's environment. I don't honestly think it can work that way.

Google! You can't afford to stay on the sidelines. It's an urgent issue for your company. And pretty soon it won't be an issue at all.

When Netscape came along in 1994, I wrote a blistering piece about how the Internet had made Microsoft irrelevant. Bill Gates wrote back asking if this meant they'd sell any fewer Flight Simulators or CD-ROM encyclopedias. That wasn't the point. Google's search revenue won't feel the rise of Twitter for many more quarters. But the place people turn to for news is shifting. It never was Google, that wasn't something it ever did well. But it is something Twitter does, and at this point it doesn't do it very well. But the path is very clear, the information they need now flows through their servers. They just have to figure out the user interface. They will eventually figure it out. That's the half of the problem that Google already knows how to solve. But Google doesn't have the users. None of its products have the kind of flow that Twitter has, nor the growth that Twitter has. That's what Google has to get busy building. Once Twitter is delivering the news search that Google can't, it will be way too late. This is probably what the Google management doesn't understand because they aren't using Twitter themselves. And if they're like most other big companies, their employees don't want to tell them what they're missing, assuming they know.

To Gates's credit, a few weeks after his lame excuse, he figured it out, and had his famous December analyst meeting where he outlined how he would attack the Internet. Unfortunately for all of us, but especially Netscape, an attack wasn't what was needed, support and love from a mature leader would have worked much better. But at least he woke up. There's no sign at all that Google is aware of the challenge.

Back in the early days of the net Stewart Alsop would write these open letters to Bill Gates and Jim Manzi telling them what they were missing. I guess for Google in 2009, that job has fallen to me.

PBS could become a cause for the web

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:03:14 GMT

Writing about open formats got me in the heady mood of the 90s. Back then we believed the Internet would be a free speech engine of democracy. I still do, to this day, but it doesn't dominate discourse the way it did back then. Today, money is more important. The purity of the early vision has been tainted by abominations like "user generated content" and "crowd sourcing." In the 90s, our websites had blue ribbons which stood for freedom. One of mine still does, to remind me of those days.

Anyway...

NPR is having its pledge drive, so I gave my money -- $150 for the year, and I encourage you to give what you can. I listen to NPR, and watch PBS. I like FreshAir, All Things Considered, Frontline, Nova, Bill Moyers. And I admit that when there's a new Frontline, I download it via BitTorrent, and I seed it to make sure it's available for others. This adds to my $150 annual contribution. I'm giving some of my bandwidth to make sure people who live outside the US and who may not be near a PBS station, can get this stuff. I want them to know how we see ourselves in the US.

Is this legal? I don't know. Does PBS object? Again, I don't know. Until now, I've never asked.

If they do, I'd encourage them to look again. BitTorrent is a very rational technology. It's a perfect fit for PBS. And it's not well understood by even some tech companies like Apple, who is banning it from the iPhone. And it's being throttled by ISPs, when they can.

Now here's the pitch. If PBS actively promoted the BitTorrent distribution of their programming, the same way it distributes podcasts of the NPR shows, it would become a celebrated cause of the net. I tell people to give, but now I could give them another reason. PBS is embracing the Internet, and helping develop the platform in a way only they can do.

Think about it.

Mark this day

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:12:56 GMT

Mark this day on your calendar.

After years of saying that instead of emulating print newspapers, Internet-based news should present the newest stuff first. I don't want sections, I want flow.

It never seemed to me it should work any other way. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 9, 1999, we put up a web app called my.userland.com that ran off the same content flow as my.netscape.com, using a then-new format called RSS. Their aggregator allowed you to lay out your own newspaper on the screen of your Mac or PC. UserLand's aggregator presented it as a flow, which I later called a "river of news" -- last-in-first-out. Want to know what's new? Visit the site and scroll until you're caught up. If something catches your fancy, click and read. When you're done, hit the Back button and resume the scroll.

So this period is important because ten years ago RSS happened.

And today is important because today the NY Times joined the party. They're now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper. Welcome to the NY Times river of news, as presented by the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/

I've had my own version of this flow for a few years. I knew this was coming, a source at the Times briefed me on it, privately, a few weeks ago. I turned off my flow, and will leave it there for the forseeable future. Go get the river at the Times website so they can get the ad revenue. Seriously. And congrats. Let's go do the other thing now, get the Times to carry news written by people who don't work at the Times. Then we'll be ready for the future.

See the next post for a note on why open formats are so important.

Why open formats are so important

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:30:32 GMT

If you look at the archive of Scripting News for May 1999, ten years ago, you'll see how important open formats are.

At the time, a large company, Netscape, had done deals with major content vendors, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Motley Fool and several others, to provide a flow of news for their new web app, my.netscape.com.

They didn't have to make this information public, they could have done private deals with each of the content sources. But they didn't. The format was documented publicly and the feeds were available to anyone who wanted to build on them.

At the time, I liked the river format, not the newpaper format that Netscape was using. Because the feeds were out there for anyone to use, I didn't have to do deals with the content companies.

They were open in another important way -- anyone could flow their content through my.netscape.com, not just the big pubs. Suppose they had never heard of you, but you wanted your webzine to be part of their system. Because the format was open, and because their web app was too, anyone could join. This was important because at the time something new was happening -- weblogs, and they could be part of the flow because of this openness. If you had to get approval, maybe only the weblogs that Netscape liked could be part of their system. That would be wrong, imho.

And when Netscape was acquired by AOL at roughly this time, all the work could continue, even though their app was gone, and the people who worked on it had moved on. It truly was a coral reef, and for me as a technologist, there is no higher praise.

Today, Facebook is nowhere near as open as Netscape was in 1999. If I had a different vision for Twitter, I'd more or less have to start from scratch. If Apple doesn't like or understand your app, you can't ship it for the iPhone. And if Google failed, we'd all be up a creek without a paddle. Now you might observe that those companies are alive and Netscape is gone. Maybe you can't be open and keep your franchise going. But what's the point of being alive if you're not free? And we don't know the outcome yet for most of these companies.

Regardless, I think it's important to honor the contribution that Netscape made in laying the foundation for all the great stuff that has happened with RSS and is still to come. Thanks Netscape!

Ten years later, we now know how well RSS worked. And let it serve as a lesson for all who follow. Let others compete with you, encourage it even. It's how you stay sharp and it's how you build markets, not just companies.

Rebooting the News #9

Mon, 11 May 2009 02:52:30 GMT

This week's Rebooting the News podcast is up.

Jay and Dave talk about paying for the news, Ted Nelson as inspiration, "Giant Pool of Money."

As usual, subscribe to this feed in your podcatcher to get all the shows.

Door-slams by MSM journos

Sun, 10 May 2009 18:40:47 GMT

I've gotten lots of angry emails from mainstream journalists about things I've written here or on Twitter, esp in the last couple of years, as things have spiraled down in newspaper-land. I understand, somebody's got to be to blame for what's happening, and I'm convenient.

But I'm not the problem -- my writing about this stuff may be a symptom, when viewed from the top of the journalist ladder. If so, then what's the problem? The same thing that's happening to all other centralized knowledge-based professions, where there used to be gatekeepers earning a living based on the high cost of distributing information. As the cost has come down, the jobs have disappeared. Journalists are not the first to be hit by this, and as I've said many times, my own short-lived profession, developing shrink-wrap software for PCs, was devastated by this a long time ago. I was lucky to have saved some money, and also have shifted what I do, so I've continued to make money over the years, even though today no one earns a living the way I did at the beginning of my career.

Today I said that journalism needs a cleansing, and I seriously believe it. I've been part of the journalism system for my entire career. When I launched products in the 80s, I did it through that system. I did reasonably well at first, because the journos understood my product. It was designed for people like them. Later I developed products that weren't so easy for a liberal arts major to understand and they didn't fare as well. But by that time I had the ability to write publicly without going through the journalism system, so even though that door was largely closed, I was still able to get the word out -- and in so doing, defined a new kind of writing which came to be known as blogging.

Today's journalists are already an anachronism, and I think they know it, and that's why there's so much anger. For many years they could pretend, like American homeowners, that their value was based on something permanent. I own a home myself, it's worth a lot less than I paid for it. I'm not happy about that, but as an adult I accept it. The same kind of acceptance is required of everyone who earns a living in journalism. And the higher up the ladder you climbed in your career, the harder that must be to accept. I get it.

But I can't help you avoid the truth. My goal actually is to work with everyone else, who has been subject to the journalism system, even victimized by it. I've watched them sell us out over and over to the huge corporations that run the tech business. There's not much love lost here for the journos. If they did the job they say they do, following the truth where ever it leads, we would have avoided a lot of problems. But they don't do that. They avoid risks, like most people. They aren't the swashbuckling and courageous investigators portrayed in the movies. They're gray, average people who feel superior to the rest of us. And that veneer is disappearing now.

When I pushed RSS, my hope was to create a level playing field, so that if journalists wanted to do excellent work and stick their necks out, it could be seen, but not with any advantage over the amateurs, the bloggers, who would have full access to the same distribution system. RSS was a total subversion of the way information used to flow, but only tapped into the power that the Internet gave us, in itself it wasn't revolutionary -- that came from the inexorable lowering of the cost of publishing and the simplification of the process, and the ease of the tools. All of these things together are what is undermining the journalism business.

Some people say I don't understand the economics of journalism, but I think I do. It's the old economics that I don't understand,. No one can understand that, because it no longer works.

Tweets of the rich and famous

Sat, 09 May 2009 20:15:56 GMT

After a week of watching the amalgamation of the 100 most followed twitterers, a few observations, and no conclusions.

1. I still hope that by amalgamating this group it will change it, make the people with all the followers more aware of how they look to their followers, and may inspire some movement.

2. There are a fair number of robot feeds in the top 100, channels that are just pushing links to stories that make money for the owners. Examples: @time, @guardiantech, nytimes, @techcrunch, @mashable.

3. The cutest of the top 100 is @anamariecox. Imho. Ymmv.

4. There's an awful lot of classic What I Had For Lunch type tweeting. The biggest offenders, the three Twitter guys, @ev, @biz and @jack. Same with @aplusk and the rappers and sports stars. They tweet infrequently and when they do they're borrring.

5. @oprah's fans got excited about Twitter for nothing. She's followed by 922K, follows 11 (all of them superstars) and has updated 38 times.

5a. Maybe something the stars aren't aware of or prepared for is how visible and transparent they are. In the non-twitter world we can't tell how much of their fan mail they respond to, or who they talk with and what they say when they're being themselves. On Twitter, we can. This might not be what they intended.

6. @timoreilly wins the prize for effort among the twitter superstars. It's pretty obvious he's doing it himself, or as obvious as it can be (he might pay someone to make it look like he's doing it himself).

7. I think people who tuned into it are as bored as I am. The usage was huge in the first few days, about 50K hits per day, but it's tailed off a lot now.

Tomorrow's inspiration

Sat, 09 May 2009 18:49:01 GMT

For the last couple of months I've done a podcast every Sunday with Jay Rosen. Three Sundays ago he had a great idea, every week let's choose someone to honor as a source of inspiration to the new journalism we see emerging.

We alternate weeks, the first time he chose Edison Carter, the reporter on the Max Headroom TV series of the 80s. Then I chose Jon Postel, the man behind many of the open protocols of the Internet, and the keeper of its spirit, who passed away just as the Internet was becoming a huge societal force. And last week Jay chose Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo. Now it's my turn.

I gave it a lot of thought. It seems we're doing the Yin and the Yang. Jay comes at it from the journalism side, and I approach from the tech side. This week I will continue in this mode.

My choice is Ted Nelson.

Nelson wrote a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines, in the 1970s, in which he chronicled, in a very bloglike fashion (long before blogs existed of course) the path that computers took to become the ideal tools for thinking and collaboration. This was a very radical idea at the time, I know because I was talking to people about the same concepts, and getting told that computers are not creative tools, by people who supposedly knew better.

There were a small number of hippie computer types, not much like the guys who wore the nerd pocket protectors. We got dates, were gregarious and outgoing, liked to do drugs, and music -- and thought computers fit into the groovy lifestyle. It was kind of a lonely thing. The hippies didn't know what to make of us and neither did the nerds. But when Nelson's book crossed my path, and the paths of people like me, it gave us a sense that others saw it the same way.

Today, few question that computers are used for thinking and collaboration, although the people who say bloggers will never do the work of journalists sound a lot like the people who questioned computers as human tools in the 70s. The venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley don't understand why someone would develop technology without a plan to get rich from it, but the hippie tech guys don't have a problem with that. Changing the world for the better is a good enough cause. Helping people share their knowledge and insight is most of what computers do, most people who use them have no hope of getting rich from using them, but they do it anyway. So while the attention focuses on the people who make the money, the real action is with the people who learn and teach and share with them.

Further, Nelson believed, as I did and still do, that computers were primarily tools to connect up to networks. Later Sun Microsystems would codify this with the slogan "The Network is the Computer."

For those who have read Nelson's book, you must have guessed that at some point I will choose Doug Engelbart, and you would be right. But I first learned of Engelbart's work through Nelson's book. I met Nelson before I met Engelbart. Neither of these heroes are perfect, but then heroes who are real people never are. But Nelson's work is monumental, it gave hope and confidence to a generation of people who did make a huge difference. That's good enough to be my choice for this week.