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The temporary web
Jeff Jarvis worries that streams, such as Twitter, threaten the longevity of the Web.
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Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.
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My own worry is that I’m twittering more and blogging less. Twitter satisfies my desire to share. That’s mostly why I blog – and that’s what makes the best blog posts, I’ve learned. I also want to store information like nuts underground; once it’s on the blog, I can find it. But when I share links on Twitter, they’ll soon disappear. I also use my blog to think through ideas and get reaction; Twitter’s flawed at that – well, I guess Einstein could have tweeted his theory of relativity but many ideas and discussions are too big for the form – yet I now use Twitter to do that now more than this blog.
Twitter still making twits of mainstream journalists
Shane Richmond at the Daily Telegraph criticizes other columnists for criticizing Twitter when they clearly know next to nothing about the microblogging site.
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It looks as though the columnists are closing ranks. In recent weeks Twitter users have raged against the Mail’s Jan Moir for bigotry and AA Gill for baboon shooting. Any one of them could be next. The Commentariat is under threat.
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They’re mistaking Twitter for a publishing platform, which – as I’ve written before – it isn’t. To criticise Twitter for its content (or, I should say, your perception of its content) makes as much sense as criticising the content of the telephone networks or the postal service. Like them, Twitter is a means of communicating. The content communicated has no bearing on its value.
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Twitter and Breaking News
Some thoughts on how news organizations are under-utilizing Twitter as a way to build their audiences.
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Twitter can be maddening in many ways, a cacophony of voices with a lousy signal-to-noise ratio—does anybody really care what somebody else had for breakfast?
But one thing that Twitter excels in is breaking news. Its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, whether it's being generated by on-the-spot observers (or participants) and retweeted far and wide, or whether it's being used by news organizations to blast out their latest headlines.
On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting
LA Times writer David Sarnos draws a line between lifecasting and mindcasting on sites like Twitter. The latter seems a better way of using social media sites.
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Twitter, the micro-messaging service where users broadcast short thoughts to one another, has been widely labeled the newest form of digital narcissism. And if it’s not self-obsession tweeters are accused of, it’s self-promotion, solipsism or flat out frivolousness.
But naysayers will soon eat their tweets. There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.
Mindcasting is where it’s at. -
Twitter takes the concept of social networking and blows the doors off
it. Because it’s a public messaging system — more like radio than
e-mail — you don’t need to be real-life ‘‘friends’’ with a person to
tune in to his feed, you just need to be interested. That means you
have the unique flexibility to program your own information stream. And
once you do, you quickly find you’re not swimming alone.
How social networking is changing journalism
A summary of comments by Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC Global News Division, on the relationship between transparency and objectivity and between journalists and the Internet.
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Objectivity, he then pointed out, had always been an idea important for the news. For him it was once designed to deliver journalism that people can trust. But in the new media age transparency is what delivers trust. He stressed that news today still has to be accurate and fair, but it is as important for the readers, listeners and viewers to see how the news is produced, where the information comes from, and how it works. The emergence of news is as important, as the delivering of the news itself.
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You get a lot of things, when you open up Twitter in the morning, but not journalism. Journalism needs discipline, analysis, explanation and context, he pointed out, and therefore for him it is still a profession. The value that gets added with journalism is judgment, analysis and explanation - and that makes the difference. So journalism will stay - he was optimistic about that. However, journalists must understand one rule: if you believe you are in competition with the internet, find your way out. Collaboration, openness and link culture are rules, you can't deny at the moment, he said.
Why Reporters Should Twitter (A Little Shop Talk)
Rob Pegoraro from the Washington Post comments on the paper's recent social networking policy flareup and then discusses why it's a good idea for reporters to be on Twitter.
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To me, it's first about making the conversation with readers more efficient. If one reader asks you a question about an article -- where'd this fact come from? what about this angle? have you checked out this related story? -- in e-mail, only that reader will gain any insight from your reply. But if you share an answer in public -- on a blog, in a comment on a blog, in a Web forum or Web chat, on Twitter, or any other place that will be indexed by the Web search engines -- other readers can benefit from your answer.
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Another large portion of my Twittering -- and the posts on my public Facebook page -- consists of little observations that, pre-social media, would have been confined to my own notes or, at best, comments in individual e-mails. Now I can throw something out there and see whether readers respond to it or not -- the phrase I most often use to describe my Twitter use is "public notebook."
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Using social networks as reporting tools
Amanda Maurer lists a few Twitter search sites that reporters can use to find sources through the site.
Using social media to improve our readers’ experience
Amanda Maurer, social media producer at the Chicago Tribune, reminds us that we need to really become a part of the communities our newspapers serve to get the most out of word-of-mouth recommendations and social networks.
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It's important to realize that our readers use sites like Facebook and Twitter because they can customize their experience and feel connected to other users. Since users can pick and chose where their information comes from, it's up to us to provide exactly what they want; whether that's a Twitter account that only chats about the latest movie reviews or an RSS feed of stories of news in their communities.
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Every single experience every employee has with a user is increasingly important. These experiences will lead the customer to either recommend or condemn your company or personal brand. The power of word of mouth is tremendous. And now, with all sorts of social media tools available online, it’s easy for folks to share their opinions, which can impact your brand even more.
A poor craftsman blames others’ tools
Jeff Jarvis criticizes a pair of posts from journalists who find no value in Twitter because, Jarvis says, they fail to see how Twitter can be a tool to improve journalism -- "not just violate its age-old dictates."
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In these screeds, we also get a glimpse of these Journalists’ definitions of journalism. I say that news was made into a product by the necessities and limitations of its means of production and distribution in print and broadcast. News is properly a process, I believe. Cohen says, no, it must have a beginning, middle, and end, a narrative he sets, an order he gives, a chaos he rejects. He says elsewhere in his column that presence is necessary to do journalism; he thus says that it takes a reporter to report, that news without the journalist him or herself bearing witness to it is not real news. He puts The Journalist at the center of news. I say the journalist is the servant of news. I tell my students to add journalistic value to what is already being spread – reporting, fact-checking, perspective, answers – but recognize that the news is there with or without them. It is gathered and spread by the people who see it and need it with new tools, like Twitter. Like it or not.
Study finds US new media use Twitter as shovelware
Most news organizations use Twitter to promote links to their own stories, rather than for community building, a paper by Marcus Messner says.
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Most tweets were news related and only just over 5% were personal. Messner said most of the tweets were pitching the news content of the organisation. Overwhelming, news outlets provided links to their own material, rather than to external sources.
The study concluded that the news media in the US use Twitter as a promotional tool, with extensive linking to their own news content, with newspapers much more active than TV stations.
Messner said more attention needs to be paid to community building, to go beyond shovelware as happened in the early days of online journalism.
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The study concluded that the news media in the US use Twitter as a promotional tool, with extensive linking to their own news content, with newspapers much more active than TV stations.
The Evolution of Retweeting
Some experts say Twitter's approach will hinder the conversational aspect of retweeting; others predict that it will create a new way of communicating.
Why I Don’t Use Twitter
Devin Coldewey tells us why he doesn't think Twitter is worth the time or effort.
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What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves.
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One could exaggerate the scope of Twitter’s service to being an alternative communication protocol at a basic level, like email or IM, and say that clients are a natural extension of that — but I think that’s disingenuous and wrong. Wrong because Twitter is meant to be simple, not fundamental.
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Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
Farhad Manjoo of Slate magazine looks at some of the calls for decentralizing Twitter, which has become an important communication tool.
The King of Twitter
Jeff Jarvis examines what the Iran election and Michael Jackson's death say about news in the age of social networking -- and he finds reason to keep his faith in the crowds.
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Back in 2005, I said that TV news was paying more attention to Jackson’s trial than the audience was, as evidenced by discussion on blogs, which lost interest in the story long before TV did; indeed, they never obsessed on Jackson as TV did and TV believed we wanted to.
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Once the supernova of news explodes – taking down Twitter search and YouTube and jamming GoogleNews search – we probably to seek out TV, but it quickly says all it has to say and the rest is just repetition.
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Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history
While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
New 'WSJ' Conduct Rules Target Twitter, Facebook
The Wall Street Journal has released a list of rules and policies to regulate its employees' conduct on Twitter and other social networking sites.
Explosion in downtown Bozeman. Twitterers first on the scene.
How we told the story of the Bozeman downtown explosion on Twitter
To Tweet or Not to Tweet
Maureen Dowd publishes a vapid and insignificant interview with the founders of Twitter, in which she throws every Twitter stereotype into their faces in an attempt to be witty. Spoiler alert: She fails.
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If people are passionate about your product, whether it’s because they’re hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios. People can use it to help each other during fuel shortages or revolts or earthquakes or wildfires. That’s the exciting part of it.
Should Twitter Remove Its Follower Count?
TechCrunch's MG Siegler says removing the follower count could improve the quality of Twitter but weaken its popularity. A fine line to walk.
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Twitter, at its core, is supposed to be about communication, not your follower count. A couple of years ago when the number of Twitter users only registered in the thousands, a user would tweet something out and maybe only a dozen other people would see it. Was Twitter any less “fun” than because of that? No. But now, it seems like there’s a mentality that if you only have a few dozen people following you on Twitter, what’s the point of saying anything? Numerous people have given that as an excuse as to why they don’t tweet very often.
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With the drive to increase follower counts, there’s certainly a concern that it’s becoming less about the core communication, and more about self-promotion and straight-up bullshit just tweeted out hoping that others will see it and start following you.
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