The Future News System of the World 

Tomorrow Jay Rosen and I are going to do our third Sunday podcast. These notes are for Jay in prep for the talk. In the spirit of being open and transparent.

Theme: I think Twitter is becoming the News System of the World and that scares the bejesus out of me. Here's why...

1. It's run by the tech industry, and the tech industry is very young and not very good about criticism.

To illustrate.. A comment in a thread on FriendFeed, and unfortunately there's no way to point to a comment in context, so I'll reproduce it here.

"On the other hand, I'm kind of glad that he put this out there in the open. I imagine it's the kind of things people at Google and Microsoft write about me when I criticize their products, except they don't have the guts to put them out there where we can see them. Truth is, the big companies, and Mozilla thinks it's one of them, do have this attitude about their users. This is why the tech industry can't be trusted to run the news networks, which is where it looks like it's going. Jay Rosen take note."

2. It's just a company, single point of failure, no route-around possible. At the same time, Twitter is having technical problems this morning. So even if they weren't just another tech company being fed constant reinforcment for the idea that the world revolves around them, it would still be unwise for the Future News System of the World to centralize on one company's set of servers. A company whose motives we know nothing about.

An aside to Fred and Bijan, this is why people need to know the business model. What are we investing in? There is a public element to what Twitter is, I'd argue the public element is much bigger than the interests of one small tech company.

Why is all this an issue for a professor of journalism? Because we're going to wake up one day, probably very soon, and realize that this is the new News System of the World, it's no longer in the future, and it's going to be owned by one company -- and that is going to suck.

Every netbook needs a sticker 

I put one sticker on each netbook, to give it some character, and to distinguish it from the others.

The first, a white Eee 901, had a sticker from the Democratic Convention in Denver.

The second, a black 1000H, which I got just before the November election, got the "I Voted" sticker I got when I voted.

I just found the sticker for the third, when cleaning out a closet, looking through an old knapsack I carried with me at Berkman, scanned below: