Scripting News

Is there value in being on the SUL?

Fri, 29 May 2009 22:49:29 GMT

I think it's self-evident that there is a lot of value in being on Twitter's Suggested User List, especially for publications that run ads on the pages they link to from posts to Twitter. And many of the most-followed Twitter users do that. You can see that if you look at the main 100TWT site, the posts of the 100 most popular Twitter users.

http://100TWT.com/

I wrote this app so I could get a sense of how these feeds were being used. Some even run outright ads in their feeds, not links to pages that have ads. AdventureGirl, with 493K followers, is an excellent example.

Some people have said that being on the SUL is like being linked to, but I don't think so. There is no web equivalent to the SUL. It's as if Google seeded their search engine so that every web newbie, when they searched for anything, got 20 of 200 sites in every response. There would be no correlation between the sites returned and the query. Further, the power of these initial sites in recommending other sites would be almost absolute. New users wouldn't have any other way to find things on the web other than the first few sites they got in their very first Google search. It's so out-there that it's hard to even explain, the web could never have worked that way, people simply wouldn't have gotten the point.

Another experiment would be to walk around the office and ask every Twitter user if they would mind having more followers. Don't say why you're asking, just ask. If they all say they don't care how many people follow them, I'll buy every one of them a bagel next time I'm in town.

I couldn't discuss this on Twitter because there's no way to explore any subtle subject 140 characters at a time. But I'm willing to discuss it here, as long as we're uncovering new ideas, and not rehashing stuff.

Note: I originally wrote this piece to reference a specific organization, but on reflection I think it works better if it it's general. These are my opinions, I don't present them as gospel, as always your mileage may vary.

Discussions in Twitter, day 2

Fri, 29 May 2009 16:32:21 GMT

Yesterday I soft-launched a little project I'm working on called twdsc.us. Today the service gets a little more real, because now you can create discussions around tweets too, and not just your own tweets, anyone's. In other words, this could get interesting.

For example, I just started a small discussion around a post by WNYC's Brian Lehrer. Apparently they had a power outage, and that's interfering with all kinds of things, including their ability to post a podcast. Maybe someone in the community can help.

And if you look in the right margin of that page, you'll see a very brief HowTo explaining how to create your own discussion pages. If you have any questions, post them here, and I'll build how this blog post and turn it into documentation.

PS: A million thanks to the guys at Disqus who provide a wonderful and flexible tool, and support it like pros.

Google's killer app

Thu, 28 May 2009 19:38:22 GMT

In May 2001 I went for a visit to Google, which was then a very young company. I offered a list of ideas that we could work on together that would help bring their search engine closer to the blogging world, which was also then, quite young.

Then as now I saw the challenge as shortening the distance in time between a post and its appearance in the search engine. I called the idea then just in time search, it's the same idea that people call "real time" today. The term "just in time" was borrowed from the manufacturing world, where the goal is to have the components needed to build a product ready at the exact moment they are needed.

The meeting was cordially breathless, we loved Google then, it felt like it was our company, they were on our side in keeping the web open and the playing field level. But the ideas discussed that day weren't implemented. I don't think this was anyone's fault because then it wasn't so easy to see exactly what was necessary. This was quite a bit before RSS solidified behind version 2.0, and weblogs.com hadn't fully bloomed yet. It may not have been obvious how to do it then, but today -- I believe it is.

I described it to Michael Gartenberg in a phone conversation this morning. It took me about five sentences and less than a minute. That deserves a blog post, I thought.

Here's what I'd like to see them do:

1. When my blog updates I ping their server with the address of the RSS feed.

2. They read the feed, note the changes from the last time they read it, update their index.

3. On the other side, they allow users to subscribe to a set of RSS feeds they maintain, either on Google or elsewhere (using OPML subscription lists). Google provides an RSS feed that can be read every minute to get all changes to the aggregated feeds.

I know they already have elements of #3 implemented in Google Reader, that's good!

The whole thing needs to be tested, burned in and tweaked with clients that do more or less what Twitter does. How it works on the back-end is Google's business.

If they want to do more, I don't have a problem with that. This is the part my software will use.

I would like to see #1 based on the weblogs.com ping protocol, which included a REST interface. I'm not wed to any particular format other than it be as simple as it possibly can be and not dependent on toolkits or having any particular software installed. No opportunities for lock-in, nothing that isn't completely transparent and simple.

Then Google gets to do what Google does best, and what we depend on them for -- run a great search engine. They get all the updates flowing through their servers. Believe me, everyone will support this. And the advantages for users are manifold. Wide choice of software to use. You can have a 140-char limit if you want, or not, if you don't, again -- your choice. You can include media objects, RSS fully provides for it, or you can choose not to. The whole point is to keep it super lightweight and give you all the choices. Let the market figure out where it goes, so we don't have to wait for any one person or group of people to figure it out. That's the Internet way of doing things.

I can be happy that at least I've written down the idea where all can see it. I don't know if anyone from Google reads my blog, or cares. Microsoft or Yahoo could do it, I would be happy to work with anyone with the search and scaling ability.

Twitter as coral reef, cont'd

Thu, 28 May 2009 15:03:28 GMT

I've been feverishly experimenting some new ideas this week, the most interesting of which is a mashup between Twitter and Disqus.

This should make Fred Wilson happy, since he is an investor in both companies. But that's not why I did it.

Here's why I did it. The 140-character limit is driving me crazy.

I need a place to express ideas that just don't fit into 140.

There are some, believe it or not.

So here's an example. Early this morning Mike Arrington posted a teaser on his exclusive personal Twitter account. "Get ready for a very, very big news day." Well, Mike ought to know, everyone's telling him stuff they tell no one else.

So I wanted to post a comment asking What's up? What does everyone think this means.

So that's what I did.

http://twdsc.us/2.html

Note the URL. Cute, huh? It's a pre-shortened url. No need to push it through any of the commercial shorteners. New trend started by my friend Andrew Baron with his new superhot beta startup mag.ma.

Anyway. So far there are 11 comments with some very interesting theories about what's up. If nothing else, it's an inventory of ideas out there that people are expecting as announcements any day now. Google's realtime search engine (would be great if it supported RSS both ways and weblogs.com compatible pinging). Microsoft's new search engine Bing (for which expectations are really low, so it should be easy for them to impress). And on and on...

Add your own two cents.

And my next sub-project is to create a bookmarklet that makes it super-easy for anyone to start a comment thread on any Twitter post they like.

So Fred, whatcha think?

PS: Proof again that Twitter is the great coral reef of the latter part of this decade. It's so easy to attach something to it, that might turn into a branch or perhaps an entirely new species!

PPS: I'm working my way through James Burke's fantastic series Connections. Just watched episode 4, which ends with the beginnings of the modern computer. Hollerith, who invented the famous card that many people used to program Fortran and Basic (such as yours truly) decided to make them the same size as the dollar bill of the day. Because there was already so much machinery that existed to process them. Oh yeah. That's the kind of tech I love. Build on what's out there. More coral-reef thinking! Yehi.

Update: The big announcement is Google Wave. How much you want to bet in 5 years it'll be as famous as OpenDoc is today.

Rebooting the News #10

Mon, 25 May 2009 03:51:46 GMT

We got this one folks!

Topics include: Maureen Dowd of course, the Church of the Savvy, One year of Twitter for Jay. Why is user interface so damned hard? 10 years since Edit This Page. And an inspired choice for Inspiration of the week, Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding.

One of the best Reboots yet, imho.

PS: As usual subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.

What are reading lists?

Sun, 24 May 2009 20:44:08 GMT

First an update on today's earlier blog post. Apparently Google Reader does not support reading lists. I think when I asked the question, the 140-character limit on Twitter made it impossible for an accurate answer.

No matter what, maybe it would be a good idea now to try to give a complete technical explanation of what a reading list is.

1. There are many kinds of "feed consumer" apps, all of them are capable of supporting reading lists, not just feed readers or aggregators. In the rest of this piece I'll use the shorthand "FC" to refer to a feed consumer app.

2. When you subscribe to a feed you're telling the FC that you want it to periodically read the contents of that feed and somehow act on the new items in the feed.

3. A reading list contains a set of feeds. The format of a reading list is exactly the same as the OPML-based subscription list format that's supported by many FCs.

4. When a FC subscribes to a readling list it does not import the feeds.

5. When the FC checks for updates, it checks for new items in the feeds in the reading list. Therefore it must keep a record of the feeds in the reading lists it is subscribed to.

6. If a new feed appears in the reading list, it does whatever it does for a new feed. Many FCs will consider all the items in the feed as "old" the first time the feed is read, esp if it's a podcatcher.

7. If a feed that was in the reading list has been removed, then the feed is not read and all record of the feed is erased from FC database, with the following exception. If a feed appears in two or more reading lists, a reference count must be maintained, and the feed is erased only when the reference count goes to zero.

8. Obviously the user can subscribe to as many reading lists as he or she likes.

9. The behavior I've described is how the NewsRiver aggregator that runs in the OPML Editor works. I suppose it's possible that other FCs work differently. If so, it would be great to hear about them.

I think that pretty much covers it.

Google's incomplete support of reading lists

Sun, 24 May 2009 15:24:00 GMT

Kevin Marks, who works at Google, tells anyone who will listen that Google Reader has a new feature that's exactly like reading lists, and that's a good thing -- because they are powerful and useful, and likely a key to making news reading work for more people.

Reading lists allow you to delegate subscription to feeds to experts. So for example, I could let Lance Knobel, an economist who I trust, choose the feeds I follow in his area of expertise. That way, when a new feed comes along, instead of sending me an email saying "Hey Dave you might want to subscribe to this feed" he can do it for me simply by adding it to his reading list.

Similarly, if a feed is no longer being updated, when Lance unsubs from it, so will I, automatically.

You can think of reading lists as a mutual fund of feeds. Busy people don't have time to research which feeds to follow and unfollow, so they delegate that to experts.

Another application -- the BBC has a large number of feeds, some for special events like the Olympics or elections. They could have a reading list for all their feeds, and when one falls off, they'd remove it, and when a new one comes on, they could add it.

It's an obvious extension to RSS, and to the ability to import and export OPML subscription lists. You can subscribe to a list of feeds in addition to individual feeds.

Now I'd love to provide reading lists for users of Google Reader, but I can't because they're using an incompatible format. This is absolutely the wrong thing to do. When asked to explain why, Marks gives a nonsense answer about the OPML Editor, which this has nothing to do with. It's always a shame when technologists, who have to answer precisely to the computer, use political spin when talking to users.

Further, if Google plans to challenge Twitter, as I've said I hope they do -- they will not get my support if they respond to Twitter's locked trunk with their own locked trunk. They must use RSS, OPML, Atom, everything they can find that there is even a bit of consensus for, including Twitter's API. They must achieve a remarkable level of compatibility to make the barrier to entry as low as it possibly can be and to send a signal that they just want to be a player in the market, not the dominator of the market.

Google's attitude in this area has been very unfortunate -- they've tended to be incompatible with existing formats whenever they can get away with it.

If Google had not invented a new format for reading lists, this would be a very different post. I'd be offering some reading lists of my own for their users to subscribe to, and encouraging my colleagues to do the same. I'd have written a howto that shows people what they need to do to create a reading list for Google Reader if they don't use Google Reader.

It's bad strategy to be gratuitously incompatible. It's also bad manners. Google was given a market for their reader built on open formats. They ought not consume that open-ness, they ought to at least preserve it, if not enhance it.

However, I will sing their praises if they fix their implementation to use the same format we use for their implementation of reading lists. If not, we'll wait to see what their efforts to compete with Twitter look like.

Maureen Dowd

Sat, 23 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

I don't want to make a federal case about it, but I don't think the press did enough checking into Maureen Dowd's explanation of the plagiarism that appeared in her column last week.

Had it been a major political figure, say a Governor or the Speaker of the House, I doubt if a vague explanation about quoting a friend would have stopped the questions. (I'm thinking of Spitzer, McGreevy and Pelosi, just a few recent examples.)

Doesn't it beg the obvious question -- who was the friend? We should know if he or she corroborates Ms. Dowd's explanation. Clearly there was plagiarism, someone committed it. If this friend is a reporter or columnist, don't his or her readers have a right to know who they are?

And by the way, Dowd hasn't admitted to plagiarism. So if we're to forgive her, if this is one-time thing, doesn't she have to say: 1. She did it and 2. She's sorry. She's done neither.

This is all part of the problem with journalism today. Maybe it has always been this way and we haven't had the tools to communicate about them without going through them. Maybe they've always been lifting copy from other writers, and only now do we have the ability to report on them instead of reporting through them.

We haven't gotten the facts from the Times and Ms. Dowd. We ought to press for them, the way a reporter would press a political leader. We, the public, their readers, are entitled to know what happened and what their standards are for columnists. If plagiarism is okay, then who can do it, and how much. Guidelines, public, open and transparent -- are a minimum requirement. Then we can decide for ourselves how much we want to trust the Times and their columnists.

I didn't read a single report from another journal saying that what Dowd did is wrong and that her explanation is unacceptable, and that the Times is stonewalling, all of which seem obvious to me. I don't know about other readers, but it's this casual attitude, the inside-dealing I see both within the press and with the people they cover that makes me unenthusiastic for ideas meant to "save" them. I'm more into reformation. I want a new kind of journalism that sees incidents like this as bugs to fix. An opportunity to make journalism even more excellent, instead of ever more mediocre.

Ole and Lena jokes never go out of style

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:14:39 GMT

Ole and Lena were laying in bed when the phone rang.

Ole answered.

"How should I know, that's over 2000 miles away!"

He slammed down the phone.

Lena says: "Who was that Ole?'"

Ole: "The hell if I know, some weirdo wants to know if the coast is clear."

This one from Jay Bryant, via email...

Ole and Lena were married in St Paul and took a bus up to Duluth for their honeymoon with a bunch of deer hunters who were heading north to catch the last day of deer hunting season.

They got about 2 hours north of St Paul when the bus broke down.

So everyone piled outside the bus for 2 hours while they waited for it to get fixed.

Ole was getting really horny and wanted to consummate the marriage out in the weeds. But Lena told him to wait.

They got back on the bus and made it within 30 minutes of Duluth when it broke down again.

So they piled off the bus and got outside.

Ole told Lena he couldn't wait any longer to have sex.

Lena asked why?

Ole responded.. Did you hear all those hunters on the bus saying:

"The fucking season is almost over!"

A big idea in a little podcast

Wed, 20 May 2009 18:26:11 GMT

It came to me while washing the dishes the other day, I figured out what the NYT should do with their Twitter feed, the one with almost a million followers.

I swear to god I didn't clue Jay in on this, but he asked me the question in yesterday's mini-podcast. I think he knew that I must be working on this puzzle and maybe he sensed I'd have something to say. Jay a really smart mofo, and he and I are developing a kind of mutual ESP. It's funny how often he asks the right question, and it's also funny how often there's a flipside story to tell about evolving media to my story about the evolution of technology. I think basically he and I have been following the same thread through our society but from opposite ends of a tunnel. We see the same thing, but come at it from different points of view.

It's really cool because he gets a chance to talk to tech people, and I get a chance to talk to journalism people. I don't think many people in the tech world knew Jay, and to the extent people in the journalism world knew me, I don't think they considered the possibility that there's much thought behind my conclusions.

Anyway, listen to the podcast if you have 15 minutes. And if you don't want to read the spoiler, stop reading right now, cause I'm going to spoil it. :-)

Here's what the Times should do. They should do what they always do when people are listening to them. Cover whatever it is that those people are saying and doing. News people are mirrors, they show you what you're doing. So if they've got the attention of people on Twitter, they should cover Twitter. Whatever that means. It's a community of hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe as large as the population of Staten Island, certainly as big as an upstate NY county. And they have a surplus of reporters there, and thousands of stringers.

Which leads me to the second part of the recommendation. Let this be the first environment when the Times deliberately includes content from respected amateurs. This is an idea I've been pushing on the Times since 2002. Now it's time finally to do it. Let this be a lab. What you'll see is that, as a result of opening the channel, a lot of new content will spring up. People will be motivated to learn how to write the kind of stuff the Times will carry. And I think everyone will be surprised at how good it is. Don't decide in advance where it goes, let it go where it's supposed to go. News people are just mirrors, not strategists, not economists or entrepreneurs. Just mirrors.

I would add a third part. Try to develop a sense of what people on Twitter are interested in, the way you know that your New York readers are interested in: 1. NY weather. 2. What did the Mets do. 3. Michael Bloomberg, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch, Bella Abzug, Jackie O, Elton John, Andy Warhol, John Lennon. 4. Etc. You get the idea. Twitter is a community with some cohesion. But it's going to change a lot in the coming months, and maybe years. Get confused along with everyone else, and write about it.

In other words, follow your nose and everything will work out. Too many reporters showing up at Jeff Jarvis confabs pretend they're Larry or Sergey or Steve or Bill. It doesn't matter what Google would do, you're not any of those people, thank god. You're reporters, and what you do is report. So that's what you should do.

If you were meant to make money doing this, as in meant by the Invisible Hand, you will. If not, something else will happen. Even the smartest financial type has no clue how the news will work economically in the future. And reporters are not smart about finance. So just do it and pray it all works out. That's basically all any of us have. So you're just like everyone else. Go figure! :-)

Rebooting the News #9.5

Wed, 20 May 2009 03:21:38 GMT

A 15-minute test-cast that turned into a mini-episode.

Jay asked me to explain why it was so important that the NYT has a River of News.

We're now using the full-blown BlogtalkRadio system, this was just a test to make sure we knew what we were doing after Sunday's disaster.

However the feed stays the same, you can follow us in your podcatcher or iTunes.

Taking off the training wheels

Tue, 19 May 2009 21:39:30 GMT

Technology loops, it follows a pattern that repeats, and we're in one of those loops right now.

Here's how it goes.

1. Something new comes along.

2. We all use one company's product because we need it simplified. I think of this as the "training wheels" phase. Not the full-power version of the technology, but a simplified one, easy to learn on.

3. Two forces oppose each other as the technology becomes familiar and popular. The company tries to build their lockin as the users crave more power. Even if the company didn't try to foreclose, eventually the users would break out because you can only get so much power from one vendor (strategy taxes and conflicts of interests rule, not maximum power for users).

4. Break out! Often explosive. Another huge wave of growth around the technology as the open version permeates the market.

5. Maturity. Back to step #1.

That's the loop. So many things have happened like this. A classic example -- email. In the 80s most people who used email did it on closed company-owned systems like MCI, Compuserve, AppleLink, then AOL and Microsoft's corporate servers. Then along with the rise of the web, email moved to the Internet, and mail servers became commodities. Everyone had one. Companies started out not wanting to operate their own servers, then because they weren't scared of running them, they broke out.

So then the question comes up, as we've been talking about now for years, what does the break-out from Twitter look like? We've tried a lot of theories, but before there's a breakout, everyone has to understand the technology, and to understand it, it seems you must know what it is.

So... What is Twitter? I didn't get any answers when I asked on Sunday. I'm watching all the public twits from people who work at Twitter to see if they have any ideas. If they do, they're not evident in the public twitstream.

I'm thinking now that Twitter is this -- A very low ramp onto blogging, which itself was a low ramp onto publishing. I told a friend today I didn't used to think it could get any lower than blogging, but I was wrong! Twitter is lower. I think for a lot of people the breakthrough in Twitter is that it makes blogging possible for them, both the reading and writing.

For a guy like me, who mastered blogging long ago, Twitter is compelling because of the people. All these new people blogging, I want to read what they write, maybe they'll come up with something! But more and more, sorry to say, I don't think they are coming up with much. I think 140 characters is really very limiting for most people. Esp when you layer all the RT's and @screennames and #hashtags and tinyurls in and on it. It's getting really crowded there in 140-character-land.

Plus if you believe the loop model, the best of the Twitter users, the ones who are doing the most interesting stuff with it, they're going to want more, soon. And they're going to also want their freedom. All of which says the investors in products like Tumblr are really smart, except they ought to offer more freedom than Twitter does and they don't appear to. It also suggests that Facebook, Movable Type and WordPress would be well-served to produce low-end products, ones that did just a little more than Twitter. The key here is to be, in every way, a Twitter clone, but relax some of the limits. I'd bet that the Twitter founders are wrong about 140 characters. It may have been magic at one time, but that's the past. It would be easy to conceive of a UX that was every bit as simple as Twitter's but didn't have that limit.

Earlier today I twitted: "I like the open web so much I'm willing to accept its limits."

Then a few hours later Larry Page hinted at the explosive breakout I'm looking for. If I can write on the web, on my own server, and still have it instantly accessible to people who follow me, whether they use twitter or splitter or donder or vixen, then I've got:

1. My choice of tools.

2. My choice of servers.

3. When Twitter goes down I stay up.

4. They can be neutral or not and no one cares.

5. I'm no longer locked in.

Just one little protocol to implement it. I ping them when I update. They read the document I say changed. If it did, re-index. If it didn't, ignore the ping. That's all. Everything about Twitter reduced to a new search engine from Google, something they're good at, and a small enhancement to my CMS (and to be clear, it's old tech, we've been doing this in the blogging world since 1999).

Oh happy day!

"cheesecake"

A policy question about web APIs

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:54:59 GMT

Andrew Baron of Rocketboom called earlier today with a question.

He's getting ready to launch a new video aggregation site called Magma. I'll have more about the site when it's ready to launch.

As part of the service they check with several major services to see if they have any information about the videos they're presenting. Today the site is making 30,000 calls a day to each site. As it ramps up it'll make hundreds of thousands of calls, and eventually millions, every day.

Now the question is -- must they contact Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, etc to inform them and/or get permission? At what point will they be throttled? What's the proper way to make contact?

I asked him to post something on this, and he has.

I'll be very interested to hear the answer myself.

Placeholder podcast

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?