Cynthia McCune's Library tagged twitter →  View Popular

I don't use the word "media." I don't use the word "news." I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

When deadly riots broke out in the western province of Xinjiang last week, the Chinese government sprang into message control mode. It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest. At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area.

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media -- and offered traditional reporters a front row seat.

What we lack is a trusted network built on new information. This, actually, is what newspaper is.

But it's also what Twitter is.

If Armageddon has broken out, then we hope our newspaper editor has saw fit to put that somewhere in the paper. Preferably on the front page. Twitter works on a filtering process too. And the filters are humans too. The difference, of course, is that we choose those filters: We select those people we follow. But otherwise the process is remarkably similar.

We might call it "discovery" - the encounter of information we didn't necessarily know we needed to know, but are glad we did. That's probably not a bad definition of news, come to think of it.

witter has other attractions. It's simple, which was something RSS hasn't quite managed to do.

It's short: Twitter was designed for mobile phone SMS messages, and so each message has to be 140 characters or less. As we found with SMS some time ago, this enforced brevity is a blessing, not a limitation.

There's another key part to this too: identity. Twitter users are usually not anonymous. Some are, but the vast majority are either clearly identified individuals or institutions.

This makes it a lot easier to filter out noise-why trust what someone has to say if you don't know who they are? - and also brings Twitter closer to what a newspaper editor does.

Chances are, once you've started following a decent range of Twitterers, you've plugged yourself into one of the best information networks there is.

Check it out. And then maybe you'll see why it's maybe the toughest challenge yet facing newspapers and other old guard media.

And yet the Internet is not just about delivery but about both information and network. Information is just that. Text, photos, video. Data. The Gospel was information. A photo on Facebook is information.

Network is a web of connections.