extensions

Announced on the Twitter blog:

Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to access search.twitter.com—there’s no need for a Twitter account.

It was a smart purchase and a good fit, something Twitter was absolutely lacking.

Still, the important question to me is, how is Twitter going to eventually make money? And will that decision completely ruin any chance of Twitter serving the public interest as a space for dialog and discourse?

To Whomever Was The Decision-Maker Behind The Cancellation Of The BPP,

You are an idiot.

Granted, that may not be the most productive way to start off this letter. But I’ve gotta tell you, you really are an idiot. Please allow me to explain why.

I’ll first go back to what I wrote when I discovered the Bryant Park Project, some seven short months ago, when I first started listening:

Others have written about the potential here, as old media (no offense, NPR radio people…) mixes with new. What’s most interesting to me is to see how it’s actually playing out, how both the folks at BPP and the fans are all trying to get a sense of this interesting community of real-time, 140-characters-or-less virtual beings in cyberspace. The somewhat inevitable cocktail party metaphor has been used, and as well the somewhat more intriguing “coffee at the local diner.”

…And it’s this acoustic space that’s created with Twitter, as conversations happen in real-time (perhaps the cocktail party metaphor is entirely appropriate?), that makes this particular space “oral,” just as much as it is written. And this orality, in turn, brings people together, and creates exactly the kind of community that BPP’s twitter-lutionary experiment is creating within their audience.

See, I’m not sure if anyone at NPR has picked up a newspaper or anything, but the Really Big Thing these days is building community around your brand. And, through the use of new media — Twitter in particular — you did just that.

You created a community of listeners; partners in the show, really. It even feels wrong to call them (us!) an “audience,” because it was something more. We got involved. We had a stake.

We felt connected.

Through our tweets, we got to interact with both the hosts and those behind the scenes. We got to follow what happened after the program ended. We got to know them; not fully, but enough to share a laugh in the morning and keep coming back for more.

What really makes you an idiot is this thing called The Long Tail. The idea is pretty simple. It’s that new media technologies — things like your web site and your twitter account — can create niche businesses that thrive online. And what can power those niches is something like the community of listeners you’ve developed all these months around the BPP.

Trust me — new media people would have killed for what you old media people had with Bryant Park.

So, look. Maybe I’ve offended you. Maybe “idiot” was harsh. Maybe you’re not an idiot.

Prove me wrong.

PS — You probably don’t know this, but those underlined words in my post are called “links” and you “click” on them with your “mouse.”

“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future…”

- Marshall McLuhan

I discovered the wonder of IRC today. Okay, before you laugh, I’ll have you know I was using LambaMOO when you young whippersnappers were in diapers!

But, all these years, never used IRC.

McLuhan’s quote is apropos, because IRC takes me back to the early days, when I first discovered how complex and fascinating technology really was, when the Internet was still a young lad. When we connected over phone lines with modems. When we used Lynx.

What’s old is new…

The dust up between the AP and the entire blogosphere has been well-discussed over the last few days. But one aspect of this issue that I haven’t seen is the question of appropriation in terms of the larger media landscape. In short, the AP is worried about protecting its IP, but in its heavy-handed approach, ignores the fact that the entire news media business is built on…ahem…”borrowing” stories and ideas from other media sources.

The tactics the AP is taking here is a well-worn path. Back in 2002, the Online Journalism Review wrote on this very issue — whether or not blogs are a “parasitic” medium:

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It’s not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.

Still, the charge riles me every time I hear it. To me, it’s a poorly informed insult of many hard-working Web publishers who are doing fresh, informative and original work. And by dismissing blogs as “parasitic,” newspaper journalists make themselves blind to the opportunities that blogging, as well as independent Web publishing in general, offer to both the newspaper industry and newspaper journalists.

And on the larger issue of the media in general:

Gordon reminded that bloggers are not alone in referencing reporter’s work.

“There is a long tradition *within journalism* of publishing and broadcasting the work of people whose primary contribution to discourse is opinion and analysis. Bloggers fall squarely within this tradition. They are parasitic only if your definition of journalism consists only of original reporting.”

If bloggers are parasitic, then so are the opinion pundits, talk radio hosts, and television broadcasters. The latter, in fact, is quite common, or at least seems so. For example, recently The New York Times front-paged an article that took on Obama’s charge that McCain would be a Bush third term. Later that day, on CNN, here’s Wolf Blitzer:

Democrats say, if you vote for John McCain, you will really be voting for a third Bush term. So, how true is that? Mary Snow is looking at the similarities between the candidate and the president.

Coincidence?

Any attribution to the NYT?

Bloggers are the new kid, the easy mark. And something of a threat to the institution of journalism. But to ignore the parasitic nature of journalism in general, and go after bloggers for copy and pasting articles — something that is actually rarely done in the blogosphere — is just plain silly.

It’s unfortunate Nicholas Carr’s new article in the Atlantic is titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, because the headline is inviting some pretty easily-dished-out ridicule. The title should have been, Is Google Making Us…Different?, as that’s the argument Carr is putting forward. So when Carr points out the Internet makes it much easier to “skim” articles, Blaise Alleyne asks why this is “chilling” (a word not even used by Carr, but instead comes from a snarky post on Radar Online) and “problematic.” Carr doesn’t say that — he doesn’t say skimming is “bad.” What Carr says is:

But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

…Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

Similarly, Mathew Ingram questions the “skimming activity” reference as well:

So let me get this straight — students skim things when they’re researching topics? Wow. That’s a real bombshell there. And the news that people skim information on the Internet doesn’t seem all that earth-shattering either; after all, there’s about a billion times as much info out there (broadly speaking) as there was a decade ago. Of course people are skimming.

Both critiques miss an essential element to Carr’s argument: medium theory. The simple version of this is McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and as Carr points out, it’s not just the act of “skimming” that’s the issue, but the media through which we conduct this activity:

Reading…is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains…We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Carr points to another example of how another technology (McLuhan, in fact, viewed all technology as “media”) , the mechanical clock, changed our sense of self:

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away…In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.”

I actually don’t think there’s much controversy about his overall premise — is there doubt that technology changes us, the way we think, and they way we think of ourselves? The work of McLuhan and Walter Ong is especially insightful here. The advent of the printing press, for example, transformed the act of reading from something “oral” and outward (even after writing, during what Ong and McLuhan call “manuscript culture,” reading was often done aloud) to something “interior.” Ong, in Orality and Literacy, describes the world of orality by asking us to “imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” For oral cultures, phrases such as “look up” or “take a note” or “read through” are empty, as they are visual metaphors, rooted in literacy and writing.

Technologies of literacy have always impacted our subjectivity, and today’s digital media are no exception.

This is what I think makes Carr’s article so powerful, that he’s articulating something we all know and sense. Can we really spell all that well anymore, when our spell-checkers do it for us? Can we write in cursive, when we now type our expressions (danah boyd has noted this…)? Can we continue to remember, when wikipedia does it for us?

Carr:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

…Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

That’s the essential argument. That’s the question Carr is asking — how are we being reprogrammed?

In the end, I have no problem with critiquing Carr’s work. In fact, he asks his readers to be skeptical of his skepticism, likening himself somewhat to a modern-day Socrates, who bemoaned the advent of a new technology (writing), but missed the many ways literacy would expand human knowledge. But if we’re going to critique his work, we should at least not miss the essential message, even if the headline stupidly uses the word stupid (Carr never uses this term in his piece…). Carr doesn’t “hate the Internet,” and I think to set this article up as a Keen-style piece of pessimism is a bit unfair, and misses the point.

Yes, the headline is bad. And yes, Carr is something of a professional contrarian, but he’s asking the right questions, and provoking a discussion that’s not really happening outside of academic circles right now.

If he is a professional contrarian, he’s one I don’t mind having around…

[Update] Carr points to a thoughtful response from Jon Udell.

Yesterday, frustrated by yet another spambot, I took my Twitter account out of the “public timeline,” which is to say I’ve limited my tweets now to only my followers. Maybe I’ll change it back, but I needed a break, some time to think about where Twitter is right now in terms of publicity.

I’m using the word “publicity” here not in the usual sense, in terms of PR and attention-seeking, but as public-ness; that is, the “quality of being public” (m-w).

It might be quaint, or even foolish, to think of Twitter as anything less than fully public, for it has always existed within what danah boyd calls “networked publics,” these virtual spaces that enable “invisible audiences” and redefine our prior notions of what’s private and what’s out in the open.

But, for a long time (a long time in Internet years, of course…), Twitter was something less than fully public. It was, foremost, new, and that limited the number of people who used the service. Even today, it’s hasn’t reached a critical mass (many people I know have never heard of it, but everyone has heard of Facebook…). Current, although speculative, stats place the number of users at about 1 million, with 200,000 active users per week — compared to, say, Daily Kos, with its 1 million average users per day, these numbers aren’t all that large.

But Twitter is growing quickly, and along the way is becoming much less like an intimate social space (a feeling made all the more apparent because of the ability to “tune” the list of people you’re following), and increasingly part of the larger, media landscape. Perhaps most significantly, Twitter is now part of our politics, as journalists, politicians, and citizens have all begun using Twitter during the current election, including gathering around this virtual water cooler on every primary night of this long campaign season.

Twitter has also made its way into the business world. Many companies have tuned into these conversations that take place in 140-character tweets, to track what people are saying about them. This is something fairly new, made possible by a growing crop of services, such as Summize and Tweetscan, that use Twitter’s APIs to interrogate and index the site’s database. Using these new web sites, anyone can create a twitter search and corresponding RSS feed, and monitor anytime anyone on Twitter mentions the search term.

For businesses, this means real-time “brand management.”

Before sites like Tweetscan came along, digging into Twitter’s database was terribly difficult. Twitter had a significant orality to it, as the lack of an interface for its archives made conversations incredibly ephemeral, much like the spoken word. Now, recalling conversations from the database is easy and instantaneous.

So, for example, a few weeks ago I mentioned (ok, complained about…) NPR’s new talk show, The Takeaway. Soon after, someone affiliated with the show popped up, asking me what was it about the program I didn’t like. Another example is the spambot from yesterday — I mentioned “peak oil” in a conversation, and a few hours later was “followed” by a service that tracks oil prices.

Summize, in fact, has taken the business proposition of monitoring tweets one step further. With a recent deal with Huffington Post, Summize is now used to display real-time tweets for every tag on the HuffPost web site. So, if you tag-search for “Obama,” you’ll get a list of the most recent conversations mentioning the candidate. While it sounds innocent enough, and maybe even useful, what is also happening is conversations taking place on Twitter are being commodified, making the Huffington Post a more valuable web site, without anyone on Twitter necessarily knowing or agreeing to this.

But what happens on Twitter is “public,” isn’t it?

Of course, Facebook at one point took its public information and, with the introduction of the news feed, began using it in ways that hardly met the expectations of its users — a privacy “trainwreck” was the result.

I had a discussion about this, with Dave Parry (aka @academicdave) yesterday. And he made a great point. To paraphrase, while no one likes turning their thoughts into a commodity, we do “get something” out of the deal — we get listeners, we build community, we develop and enhance our reputation as individuals. These things, Dave argued, are more important than money.

To an extent, I agree. But that premise also has to be questioned, because in a neoliberal capitalist world (a world which includes the Web 2.0 ideology and business model), isn’t money, well, everything?

In a critical examination of Web 2.0, Petersen uses the term “loser generated content” to describe this political economy at work. In his essay, he describes the way social networking sites create strong ties for their users:

The demography of the people I interviewed places them on the left side of the political spectrum; they are at times directly anti–corporate/capitalist in the pictures they upload and their comments. Nonetheless, most of them do not see a problem in having such close ties with a particular company. This can only be explained with reference to the immense joy and pleasure they get out of sharing photos online. The huge amount of work that goes into each personal site is paid back in an affective currency: the joy and significance these sites bring to their users.

This “affective currency” is, in part, what Dave refers to above. But the real value proposition for Web 2.0 sites isn’t the photos we post on Flickr, or the actual words we say on Twitter. Content is no longer king — context data is:

What you buy, when acquiring a social networking site, is not content but context data produced by users and communities. In this way the architecture of participation turns into an architecture of exploitation and enclosure, transforming users into commodities that can be sold on the market.

…Relations are the key here. We need to acknowledge that relations of subjectivity, everyday life, technology, media and publics also are related to dimensions of capitalism. This relation reconfigures patterns of use into practices which caries a resemblance of work relations, transforming users into losers.

The problem isn’t really even with Twitter — it’s free right now, but it’s still someone’s idea of a business plan. Eventually, advertising will likely be added, and that’s how Twitter will make money.

The real problem is one that’s argued in Naomi Klein’s No Logo (via here):

“The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations over the last fifteen years can arguably be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid–1980’s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products… this corporate obsession with brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space: … on youthful identities, … and on possibilities of unmarketed space.”

No space. I started off this post talking about publicity. It’s a term Habermas uses in his discussion of the public sphere, and it’s directly related to the question of just how our tweets are used. I’m not so sure virtual space is endless — more and more of it is being co-opted by corporate interests. And while Huffington Post is an order of magnitude smaller than “Big Media” right now, that won’t likely last for long. (Arianna Huffington, in fact, doesn’t think of her site as a blog at all; she calls it an “Internet newspaper.”)

The point here is, we need space. We need a public sphere. We need a way to create publicity — to gain listeners, to establish and enhance our reputations — without creating wealth. Or becoming an ad for some Web 2.0 venture capitalist’s latest programmatic dream. There are pockets of this kind of publicity today — increasingly the political blogosphere is shaping our politics. Citizen journalism is on the rise. Wikipedia is a non-profit, more or less altruistic endeavor.

At the very least, we need to be cognizant of where our tweets end up.

NPR’s BPP this morning had a segment on photobombing. And with one look at the photos featured here on this site, it’s easy to see this practice is completely and infectiously hilarious, worthy of Buzzfeed’s Internet meme status. What is it?

Intentionally turning up in the background of other people’s photographs with the goal of ruining them now has a name: Photobombing. I do this daily, unintentionally, walking along Canal Street to work, but the art of the photobomber is appearing in the background at just the right moment and with just the right face.

Curiously, it’s not the only definition out there. Wikipedia actually lists another definition: “the act of attaching a numbered series of photographs to public places.” The person behind this scheme has a website, where he explains in the FAQ how he planted his photos, and what to do if you find them.

I’m more interested, though, in the first definition. While hilarious, it’s also a bit strange, because the joke here is assumed. You really don’t get to see the look on your “victim’s” faces when they realize you’ve ruined (or enhanced…) their photo. It’s a joke in the potential, and, as everyone knows, pranks like this are funnier when you get to share in the laughter.

Is a whoopee cushion, or today’s high tech version, still funny if you’re not around to hear it?

So while it’s funny to think you’re going to show up looking ridiculous in someone else’s picture, you’ll never see it realized. It’s probably only a stoke of luck that you’d ever stumble across it posted on Facebook, or some other site. Maybe this makes more sense if this thing takes off, and we see photobombing sites appear, where you can see the fruits of your labor posted somewhere.

Oh hell. No sense overthinking it.

If something’s funny, it’s funny.

Discuss.

(Spoilers inside, of course.)

There is a site now up for Mario Batali’s new PBS show, “Spain..On The Road Again.” Apparently, Batali has convinced some public television executives that him, eating and driving his way through Spain in a convertible Mercedes-Benz with a food writer and two beautiful actresses, would make good television. And judging from the video sneak peek they’ve posted on the site, it probably will.

But Batali also gets to eat and drive driving his way through Spain in a convertible Mercedes-Benz with a food writer and two beautiful actresses.

That, my friends, is the kind of genius I can respect.

Rolling Stone had a blog post today, criticizing Jon Stewart for not going after John McCain last night on The Daily Show. Swampland today asked, “Is Jon Stewart A Journalist?”

No, he’s not. He makes jokes for a living. Nothing more. Jon Stewart is not going to save this Republic. That’s the job of the Press.

We’ve got, like, a whole Constitutional Amendment about that.