Scripting News

The NY Times/Twitter feed

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:34:43 GMT

Today I was thinking about what, in an ideal world, to do with the Twitter feed of the NY Times.

It has 852,709 followers. That's potentially quite powerful.

This is what I came up with.

Think about two communities: 1. The people who use Twitter and those who are likely to use it in the near future. 2. The people who use the NY TImes now and in the near future.

The community you're serving with this feed is the intersection between the two.

The feed should be used to push links to stories that would interest someone in this community. But not just stories from the NY Times.

The criteria would be: Would an informed person want to know about this? And does it fit the Twitter lifestyle of short attention span and retweeting.

"All the news that's fit to print" meets "People come back to places that send them away."

Could be very interesting.

Opting-out of TechMeme

Wed, 13 May 2009 20:57:25 GMT

I appreciate all the flow that TechMeme has sent to scripting.com over the years, but it's time to say a tearful goodbye. I think we'll do better independent of the community that TM defines. It has shifted over time, away from the individual and toward the "corporate blog" -- and I feel better just reading the TechMeme sites, and not participating in the discourse.

So long, and thanks for all the fish! It's been fun.

Lessons from the changes in Twitter

Wed, 13 May 2009 17:51:28 GMT

Interesting changes in the Twitter community in the last 24 hours.

Here's what happened, from my point of view.

1. At some point yesterday afteroon I logged on and saw a message on the Twitter home page advising of a change in the way Reply works. It pointed to the Twitter blog for more info. I clicked on the link, but there was nothing there about Reply. Refreshed the home page and the advisory was gone. I gather most people did not see the advisory.

2. Started seeing comments about the change.

3. A blog post appeared, explaining in confusing terms what had changed.

4. Lots of theories.

5. A reference back to a post by Evan Williams last year, wondering if they shouldn't change the way Reply works.

6. More discussion.

7. It turns out there are technical reasons for the change. We don't know what they are. Biz Stone is surprised at how much interest there is in the change.

Now some comments...

I think the changes are okay, and I don't understand the technical reasons. I inferred that there must be a technical reason for the change, because it would have been simple enough to make it subject to a preference. As was pointed out many times on Twitter, it had been a preference. Therefore the inference.

When communicating with the community, the Twitter folk from now on should assume that every change will be examined in all possible nuance, with all theories explored, very quickly. Therefore, try to say what you know you're going to eventually admit to, as soon as possible. It will help build trust.

None of us outside the company have a clear picture of how the system works behind the user interface, esp since the performance issues were mostly resolved. Why is this feature so expensive? Unknown.

There will be many more problems like this in the future, some not so benign. The danger is that all the functionality of Twitter is centralized.

The centralization problems are in three areas: 1. Technical. 2. Financial. 3. Political.

The technical issues are obvious. If there is no redundancy in their network and a critical component fails, the whole thing goes down. I don't think people really are prepared for how disconnected we all will feel if this happens.

Assume that a change in ownership occurs at some point. What will the new owners change about Twitter. We have some feel for how the current ownership thinks. We obviously have no idea how a potential new owner thinks or what they might choose to sell. They could decide to sell information that we don't want sold.

The political threat is a major concern. Consider the pressure being applied to Craigslist over prostitution by the states attorney generals. What if prostitutes are operating on Twitter? What if a major act of terrorism is organized using Twitter? Would there be pressure to shut it down, or greatly control what it's used for? Remember the atmosphere after 9-11. Not so far-fetched. But it was hard to control the web, it was too diverse. Twitter, which is fully centralized, would be easy for a government to control.

Centralization has its niceties, for sure. They come up every time I warn of its dangers. This change was a very small reminder of what is, if you believe in Murphy's Law, as I do -- certainly in our future if we don't diversify.

Update: A smart look at this by Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW.

Google this is your wakeup call

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:49:45 GMT

I'm reading various reports on Google's announcments about search today, and it sounds scattered and totally uninspiring. And I might add, disappointing.

Google is today a big company, and it seems to lack the resolve to go into middle age with any passion. If ever there was a time to show some exciting new features for search, this was it -- and none of it was in any way exciting.

When Google came along, the CEOs of the existing search companies didn't pay much attention. They probably didn't understand what was so exciting about Google. It was very much like the way the leaders of the minicomputer industry reacted to the early PC, at first dismissive, then with arrogance. Their products seemed to assume they would overcome the challenge, and none of them did. The only one to make the transition was IBM, and then a few years later they would try to lock in the users, and finally lose out to the new companies that had cloned their products.

Twitter is that kind of generational challenge to Google. They have no choice but the same one IBM had with the Apple II, and Microsoft had with Netscape. They must compete, with a respectful product, one that is compatible with Twitter, and gives users a benefit of coming from a strong mature company. The time for this product is passing every week, as Twitter stabilizes and delivers a reliable service. Google's clone should have come out last summer when Twitter was having trouble keeping their servers up.

If I could talk to the management at Google, I would tell them to stop everything, go away for a week, and learn how to use Twitter, yourself. Get an inkling of what is so exciting and different about it. You can't get the gestalt by looking at the features, you have to see how people are using it and who they are. It's not about Oprah or Ashton Kutcher, it's about the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, and a hundred NY Times reporters who are breaking their company's rules by using Twitter the way bloggers were telling them to use the web. Twitter is in many ways the realization of the full promise made by blogging so many years ago. It's really exciting to see it come to fruition, but it's also depressing that it's all happening inside one company's environment. I don't honestly think it can work that way.

Google! You can't afford to stay on the sidelines. It's an urgent issue for your company. And pretty soon it won't be an issue at all.

When Netscape came along in 1994, I wrote a blistering piece about how the Internet had made Microsoft irrelevant. Bill Gates wrote back asking if this meant they'd sell any fewer Flight Simulators or CD-ROM encyclopedias. That wasn't the point. Google's search revenue won't feel the rise of Twitter for many more quarters. But the place people turn to for news is shifting. It never was Google, that wasn't something it ever did well. But it is something Twitter does, and at this point it doesn't do it very well. But the path is very clear, the information they need now flows through their servers. They just have to figure out the user interface. They will eventually figure it out. That's the half of the problem that Google already knows how to solve. But Google doesn't have the users. None of its products have the kind of flow that Twitter has, nor the growth that Twitter has. That's what Google has to get busy building. Once Twitter is delivering the news search that Google can't, it will be way too late. This is probably what the Google management doesn't understand because they aren't using Twitter themselves. And if they're like most other big companies, their employees don't want to tell them what they're missing, assuming they know.

To Gates's credit, a few weeks after his lame excuse, he figured it out, and had his famous December analyst meeting where he outlined how he would attack the Internet. Unfortunately for all of us, but especially Netscape, an attack wasn't what was needed, support and love from a mature leader would have worked much better. But at least he woke up. There's no sign at all that Google is aware of the challenge.

Back in the early days of the net Stewart Alsop would write these open letters to Bill Gates and Jim Manzi telling them what they were missing. I guess for Google in 2009, that job has fallen to me.

PBS could become a cause for the web

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:03:14 GMT

Writing about open formats got me in the heady mood of the 90s. Back then we believed the Internet would be a free speech engine of democracy. I still do, to this day, but it doesn't dominate discourse the way it did back then. Today, money is more important. The purity of the early vision has been tainted by abominations like "user generated content" and "crowd sourcing." In the 90s, our websites had blue ribbons which stood for freedom. One of mine still does, to remind me of those days.

Anyway...

NPR is having its pledge drive, so I gave my money -- $150 for the year, and I encourage you to give what you can. I listen to NPR, and watch PBS. I like FreshAir, All Things Considered, Frontline, Nova, Bill Moyers. And I admit that when there's a new Frontline, I download it via BitTorrent, and I seed it to make sure it's available for others. This adds to my $150 annual contribution. I'm giving some of my bandwidth to make sure people who live outside the US and who may not be near a PBS station, can get this stuff. I want them to know how we see ourselves in the US.

Is this legal? I don't know. Does PBS object? Again, I don't know. Until now, I've never asked.

If they do, I'd encourage them to look again. BitTorrent is a very rational technology. It's a perfect fit for PBS. And it's not well understood by even some tech companies like Apple, who is banning it from the iPhone. And it's being throttled by ISPs, when they can.

Now here's the pitch. If PBS actively promoted the BitTorrent distribution of their programming, the same way it distributes podcasts of the NPR shows, it would become a celebrated cause of the net. I tell people to give, but now I could give them another reason. PBS is embracing the Internet, and helping develop the platform in a way only they can do.

Think about it.

Mark this day

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:12:56 GMT

Mark this day on your calendar.

After years of saying that instead of emulating print newspapers, Internet-based news should present the newest stuff first. I don't want sections, I want flow.

It never seemed to me it should work any other way. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 9, 1999, we put up a web app called my.userland.com that ran off the same content flow as my.netscape.com, using a then-new format called RSS. Their aggregator allowed you to lay out your own newspaper on the screen of your Mac or PC. UserLand's aggregator presented it as a flow, which I later called a "river of news" -- last-in-first-out. Want to know what's new? Visit the site and scroll until you're caught up. If something catches your fancy, click and read. When you're done, hit the Back button and resume the scroll.

So this period is important because ten years ago RSS happened.

And today is important because today the NY Times joined the party. They're now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper. Welcome to the NY Times river of news, as presented by the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/

I've had my own version of this flow for a few years. I knew this was coming, a source at the Times briefed me on it, privately, a few weeks ago. I turned off my flow, and will leave it there for the forseeable future. Go get the river at the Times website so they can get the ad revenue. Seriously. And congrats. Let's go do the other thing now, get the Times to carry news written by people who don't work at the Times. Then we'll be ready for the future.

See the next post for a note on why open formats are so important.

Why open formats are so important

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:30:32 GMT

If you look at the archive of Scripting News for May 1999, ten years ago, you'll see how important open formats are.

At the time, a large company, Netscape, had done deals with major content vendors, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Motley Fool and several others, to provide a flow of news for their new web app, my.netscape.com.

They didn't have to make this information public, they could have done private deals with each of the content sources. But they didn't. The format was documented publicly and the feeds were available to anyone who wanted to build on them.

At the time, I liked the river format, not the newpaper format that Netscape was using. Because the feeds were out there for anyone to use, I didn't have to do deals with the content companies.

They were open in another important way -- anyone could flow their content through my.netscape.com, not just the big pubs. Suppose they had never heard of you, but you wanted your webzine to be part of their system. Because the format was open, and because their web app was too, anyone could join. This was important because at the time something new was happening -- weblogs, and they could be part of the flow because of this openness. If you had to get approval, maybe only the weblogs that Netscape liked could be part of their system. That would be wrong, imho.

And when Netscape was acquired by AOL at roughly this time, all the work could continue, even though their app was gone, and the people who worked on it had moved on. It truly was a coral reef, and for me as a technologist, there is no higher praise.

Today, Facebook is nowhere near as open as Netscape was in 1999. If I had a different vision for Twitter, I'd more or less have to start from scratch. If Apple doesn't like or understand your app, you can't ship it for the iPhone. And if Google failed, we'd all be up a creek without a paddle. Now you might observe that those companies are alive and Netscape is gone. Maybe you can't be open and keep your franchise going. But what's the point of being alive if you're not free? And we don't know the outcome yet for most of these companies.

Regardless, I think it's important to honor the contribution that Netscape made in laying the foundation for all the great stuff that has happened with RSS and is still to come. Thanks Netscape!

Ten years later, we now know how well RSS worked. And let it serve as a lesson for all who follow. Let others compete with you, encourage it even. It's how you stay sharp and it's how you build markets, not just companies.

Rebooting the News #9

Mon, 11 May 2009 02:52:30 GMT

This week's Rebooting the News podcast is up.

Jay and Dave talk about paying for the news, Ted Nelson as inspiration, "Giant Pool of Money."

As usual, subscribe to this feed in your podcatcher to get all the shows.

Door-slams by MSM journos

Sun, 10 May 2009 18:40:47 GMT

I've gotten lots of angry emails from mainstream journalists about things I've written here or on Twitter, esp in the last couple of years, as things have spiraled down in newspaper-land. I understand, somebody's got to be to blame for what's happening, and I'm convenient.

But I'm not the problem -- my writing about this stuff may be a symptom, when viewed from the top of the journalist ladder. If so, then what's the problem? The same thing that's happening to all other centralized knowledge-based professions, where there used to be gatekeepers earning a living based on the high cost of distributing information. As the cost has come down, the jobs have disappeared. Journalists are not the first to be hit by this, and as I've said many times, my own short-lived profession, developing shrink-wrap software for PCs, was devastated by this a long time ago. I was lucky to have saved some money, and also have shifted what I do, so I've continued to make money over the years, even though today no one earns a living the way I did at the beginning of my career.

Today I said that journalism needs a cleansing, and I seriously believe it. I've been part of the journalism system for my entire career. When I launched products in the 80s, I did it through that system. I did reasonably well at first, because the journos understood my product. It was designed for people like them. Later I developed products that weren't so easy for a liberal arts major to understand and they didn't fare as well. But by that time I had the ability to write publicly without going through the journalism system, so even though that door was largely closed, I was still able to get the word out -- and in so doing, defined a new kind of writing which came to be known as blogging.

Today's journalists are already an anachronism, and I think they know it, and that's why there's so much anger. For many years they could pretend, like American homeowners, that their value was based on something permanent. I own a home myself, it's worth a lot less than I paid for it. I'm not happy about that, but as an adult I accept it. The same kind of acceptance is required of everyone who earns a living in journalism. And the higher up the ladder you climbed in your career, the harder that must be to accept. I get it.

But I can't help you avoid the truth. My goal actually is to work with everyone else, who has been subject to the journalism system, even victimized by it. I've watched them sell us out over and over to the huge corporations that run the tech business. There's not much love lost here for the journos. If they did the job they say they do, following the truth where ever it leads, we would have avoided a lot of problems. But they don't do that. They avoid risks, like most people. They aren't the swashbuckling and courageous investigators portrayed in the movies. They're gray, average people who feel superior to the rest of us. And that veneer is disappearing now.

When I pushed RSS, my hope was to create a level playing field, so that if journalists wanted to do excellent work and stick their necks out, it could be seen, but not with any advantage over the amateurs, the bloggers, who would have full access to the same distribution system. RSS was a total subversion of the way information used to flow, but only tapped into the power that the Internet gave us, in itself it wasn't revolutionary -- that came from the inexorable lowering of the cost of publishing and the simplification of the process, and the ease of the tools. All of these things together are what is undermining the journalism business.

Some people say I don't understand the economics of journalism, but I think I do. It's the old economics that I don't understand,. No one can understand that, because it no longer works.

Tweets of the rich and famous

Sat, 09 May 2009 20:15:56 GMT

After a week of watching the amalgamation of the 100 most followed twitterers, a few observations, and no conclusions.

1. I still hope that by amalgamating this group it will change it, make the people with all the followers more aware of how they look to their followers, and may inspire some movement.

2. There are a fair number of robot feeds in the top 100, channels that are just pushing links to stories that make money for the owners. Examples: @time, @guardiantech, nytimes, @techcrunch, @mashable.

3. The cutest of the top 100 is @anamariecox. Imho. Ymmv.

4. There's an awful lot of classic What I Had For Lunch type tweeting. The biggest offenders, the three Twitter guys, @ev, @biz and @jack. Same with @aplusk and the rappers and sports stars. They tweet infrequently and when they do they're borrring.

5. @oprah's fans got excited about Twitter for nothing. She's followed by 922K, follows 11 (all of them superstars) and has updated 38 times.

5a. Maybe something the stars aren't aware of or prepared for is how visible and transparent they are. In the non-twitter world we can't tell how much of their fan mail they respond to, or who they talk with and what they say when they're being themselves. On Twitter, we can. This might not be what they intended.

6. @timoreilly wins the prize for effort among the twitter superstars. It's pretty obvious he's doing it himself, or as obvious as it can be (he might pay someone to make it look like he's doing it himself).

7. I think people who tuned into it are as bored as I am. The usage was huge in the first few days, about 50K hits per day, but it's tailed off a lot now.

Tomorrow's inspiration

Sat, 09 May 2009 18:49:01 GMT

For the last couple of months I've done a podcast every Sunday with Jay Rosen. Three Sundays ago he had a great idea, every week let's choose someone to honor as a source of inspiration to the new journalism we see emerging.

We alternate weeks, the first time he chose Edison Carter, the reporter on the Max Headroom TV series of the 80s. Then I chose Jon Postel, the man behind many of the open protocols of the Internet, and the keeper of its spirit, who passed away just as the Internet was becoming a huge societal force. And last week Jay chose Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo. Now it's my turn.

I gave it a lot of thought. It seems we're doing the Yin and the Yang. Jay comes at it from the journalism side, and I approach from the tech side. This week I will continue in this mode.

My choice is Ted Nelson.

Nelson wrote a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines, in the 1970s, in which he chronicled, in a very bloglike fashion (long before blogs existed of course) the path that computers took to become the ideal tools for thinking and collaboration. This was a very radical idea at the time, I know because I was talking to people about the same concepts, and getting told that computers are not creative tools, by people who supposedly knew better.

There were a small number of hippie computer types, not much like the guys who wore the nerd pocket protectors. We got dates, were gregarious and outgoing, liked to do drugs, and music -- and thought computers fit into the groovy lifestyle. It was kind of a lonely thing. The hippies didn't know what to make of us and neither did the nerds. But when Nelson's book crossed my path, and the paths of people like me, it gave us a sense that others saw it the same way.

Today, few question that computers are used for thinking and collaboration, although the people who say bloggers will never do the work of journalists sound a lot like the people who questioned computers as human tools in the 70s. The venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley don't understand why someone would develop technology without a plan to get rich from it, but the hippie tech guys don't have a problem with that. Changing the world for the better is a good enough cause. Helping people share their knowledge and insight is most of what computers do, most people who use them have no hope of getting rich from using them, but they do it anyway. So while the attention focuses on the people who make the money, the real action is with the people who learn and teach and share with them.

Further, Nelson believed, as I did and still do, that computers were primarily tools to connect up to networks. Later Sun Microsystems would codify this with the slogan "The Network is the Computer."

For those who have read Nelson's book, you must have guessed that at some point I will choose Doug Engelbart, and you would be right. But I first learned of Engelbart's work through Nelson's book. I met Nelson before I met Engelbart. Neither of these heroes are perfect, but then heroes who are real people never are. But Nelson's work is monumental, it gave hope and confidence to a generation of people who did make a huge difference. That's good enough to be my choice for this week.

Tweeting behind the firewall

Sat, 09 May 2009 01:27:30 GMT

I just added a new feature to 100twt.com tonight, with the help of Daniel and Jason at Disqus: You can now comment on the tweets of people in the Top 100. That's just the first toe-dip into commenting on tweets in general, a starting point.

To kick it off I posted a comment on a tweet by @ev, where he talks about a tweetranet at a staff meeting at Twitter HQ today. This is a topic much in the air these days after a blog post by Matt Mullenweg at wordpress.com about a behind-the-firewall Twitter-like system they're using there.

Lots of opportunity here, we did something similar in 2001 at UserLand. It's all coming back around folks.

The cool thing about comments, they're not limited to 140 chars!

Amazon's new URL-shortener

Fri, 08 May 2009 20:44:36 GMT

In March, I observed that Amazon had already done some URL shortening on its own, meaning that a link like this:

http://amazon.com/wii

actually works. Now, apparently they've gone further and have a shorter domain, amzn.com and a huge number of short URLs in that domain that take you to product pages on amazon.com.

Mike Koss wrote a script that worked its way through a dictionary trying all the different words, and published the list. (That's what I call investigative journalism, so much for bloggers being lazy.)

I'd love to see an official word from Amazon on this. How is a user supposed to go from a page on Amazon to a short URL? Even better, suppose they had a bookmarklet that would automatically populate the Twitter "What are you doing?" box with some text and a copy of the short URL? Might be a real money-maker, and we know that Amazon likes to make money! (And Bezos is also an investor in Twitter.)

Nothing from nothing

Fri, 08 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

RSS is dead? My ass...

Thu, 07 May 2009 01:48:08 GMT

I've been programming like a bat out of hell, in one of my most hectic spurts of creativity in a very long time. Not much time for blogging.

One of the results is a site where you can view the tweets of the 100 most-followed people and corporations on Twitter. These really reflect the friendships and choices of Twitter the company, pretty sure they're all on the SUL. But they're using Twitter, and it's fascinating to see how. Esp to see this as a benchmark, a beginning. What will the tweeting of the top 100 look like in a year? Already you can see it's very competitive.

It's coool. There's a lot more coming, if any of the other stuff I'm working on reaches fruition.

I'm singing a happy song! I love the work I'm doing.

I'm thinking of Mick Jagger and the band, warming up, and some drunken asshole is yelling at him from the audience. Jagger says, in his inimitable Jagger style: "Everything okay up there in the critics section?" And then they swing into a great rock and roll song, which I could remember which one.

Steve Gillmor, writing in TechCrunch says RSS is dead. He has a nice picture of the Beatles in what must be their last year as a group. RSS ain't like the Beatles, Steve, it's more like the Stones. Rough and passionate. And still with us after all these years.

As I said in the comments on Steve's post, with some irony, RSS is as dead as HTTP and SMTP, which is to say it's alive and kicking. These protocols get widely implemented, are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don't die, they don't rest in piece. They become the foundation for everything that follows.

When you reboot your computer, whether it's a Mac or Linux machine or Windows box or netbook, probably even your cellphone, they all first load some ancient code written in the 70s by some guy no one remembers. That's the way software works.

Mick Jagger didn't say Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry are dead. He loved those guys. Their work lived on in his music, and he was good to them. It's time for the tech biz to learn about love, Steve. Open your heart and sing happy birthday to RSS. It's been very good to you. You should be good to RSS, though god knows most of the icons of tech have been really unappreciative at the gifts RSS brought them. It's really sad what grumpy pissy jerks these guys are.

There are bursts of inspiration with wide open fields in front of you, huge memory spaces, and then things get crowded and we move on, looking for new frontiers to explore. The early years of the web, the early-mid 90s were like that. It was in that environment that RSS sprouted, after a few failed attempts with too much hype. I feel like we're there again, and it's not like the 70s, it's like the 30s. The film industry of today is still refining the art that was invented in that period as the next decades will be spent building and revising that which was defined in the last few decades.

That's why I love Joan Crawford, btw -- she's one of the very few stars of the silent era to blossom in the talkies. You can see her in this clip from The Hollywood Revue of 1929, along with many of the stars who didn't make the transition. Can you see the charm in the young Joan Crawford, and why it worked so well in both the new and old media?

PS: Just got a funny DM from Anil Dash. He says: "Just call their bluff! Anybody who thinks RSS is dead should stop publishing their feeds or shut up. Easy!" Hmmm. That's a good point.

Gadget talk with Scoble

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:46:29 GMT

I was browsing FriendFeed yesterday and saw Scoble had started a thread on the new Kindle, which was being dismissed by the tech press as a "Hail Mary pass" to save the news industry. I don't see it that way. I like the Kindle, esp for reading the news, but a Kindle with a bigger screen might make the news even more attractive. Do I think it will work? I don't know, but why not give it a try.

So I called BlogTalkRadio, then called Scoble and we did a quick podcast, that started out talking about the Kindle, but turned to gadgets, the iPhone, the MIT Tech Review slam of Clay Shirky and myself, and on to opportunities for the Palm Pre to zig where Apple zags. They could let the software market run without control from the mother ship, see what happens. Maybe there are some great X-rated apps for mobile devices?

As always, you can subscribe to my podcasts using a podcatcher or iTunes.

Tricks your mind plays

Tue, 05 May 2009 02:57:00 GMT

It's confusing when your mind plays tricks because it's playing many roles.

1. It is the subject of the trick (it's doing the tricking).

2. It is the object of the trick (it's being tricked).

3. It is perceived by the mind to be something other than what it is (the trick worked).

4. And the mind perceives itself misperceiving (it's aware the trick worked).

5. You can see this never ends.

In the early days of the blogosphere we called this: watching them watch us watch them watch us watch them watch us. We're still doing it, many years later -- and it was going on long before the blogosphere. Humans are all about watching, mostly watching other humans, and in doing so hoping to learn something about themself. To the extent that we're aware that there are things that are not human, we tend to anthropomorphize them -- treat them as if they were human.

Sometimes the tricks are willful, but usually it all happens below the consciousness. I play willful tricks all the time. To quit smoking there's a lot of trickery involved. My mind has trained itself to believe many things that are untrue about smoking. Some examples: Without smoking I will die. I use smoking to solve problems. I can't quit. Of course you can. If you put your foot down and said "Enough of this foolishness" to yourself, as an adult to a child, there would be no argument. But you never say that, because you don't want to quit and in order not to, you have to believe you can't.

It's so incredibly complicated. Mostly because there are so many observers all in one body. With so many different versions of the truth it's hard to sort it all out.

Now when you add millions of people to the mix, as you do on the Internet, without the normal cues and gestures that give you some idea of where the other people are coming from, the amount of trickery, conscious and unconscious, goes way up.

When someone says something emotional about another person, based only on knowing them through the Internet, they're really describing how they feel when they're reading what that person has written.

When someone says "He's really angry" what they really mean is "I feel angry when I read his writing."

There's no way you can know if someone is angry or not, esp if you're just reading. And if you were right, you're talking about an emotion that occurred in the past, when he or she was writing what you are reading now. To respond to this person as if he is angry now would be a mistake. Think about how quickly emotions pass. I can be angry or scared and in five minutes be relaxed and feel safe. Watch a child, their emotions shift in fractions of a second. All you can be sure of is how you feel. And given all the tricks you're playing on yourself all the time, maybe you're not actually so sure.

Rebooting the News #8

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:56:43 GMT

This week's podcast with Jay Rosen is up.

Topics: Jay opted out of Twitter's Suggested Users List, he explains why and we discuss. His choice for Inspiration of the Week is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

As always, you can subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.

Conflicts of interest in tech

Sun, 03 May 2009 23:25:19 GMT

It's Jay's week for the source of inspiration, so I'm bringing a different topic to our weekly potluck of speculation about Rebooting The News.

Obviously we're going to talk about Twitter's suggested users list.

Last week: 1. Jay was put on the list, 2. Got the surge in new followers, then 3. Asked to be taken off, and 4. Was taken off.

You can see the effect on his follower count in this graph. I took a screen shot because it will scroll off over time. It's stunning. Very clearly, being on the SUL has a dramatic effect on your count.

We've talked about conflicts of interest among journalists, but haven't talked about the same thing for tech people. Mike Arrington tried to ignite a scandal around me over something that happened at UserLand in 2002, when I was on the vendor side (and a blogger, which is part of what blogging was and is about). I responded, not with a blanket dismissal such as "Vendors don't have conflicts of interest" -- because I believe they do. They can get themselves out of conflict by divesting and/or disclosing. I guess most people felt that what I did wasn't so bad, because the hatefest never came about, and Mike looked bad, as if he was trying to deflect attention away from an article I had written the day before, about the conflicts that arise from accepting a large gift from a vendor you cover, without disclosing it when you write about them.

Today we'll find out, from Jay, what it means for a professor of journalism, and for an ordinary human being to receive such a gift.

In the course of the public discussion last week, I said that if I were put on the Suggested Users List, I would ask to be removed, and if the request wasn't honored, I would delete the account. I don't want the distortion it causes. I don't see Twitter as an advertising medium, I am not a journalist and could ethically receive a gift from a vendor, even so I would refuse it. I don't believe that Twitter should be getting in the middle of the relationship between users of its service. That's sacred territory. This is a matter of net neutrality. Could someone like Mike, who writes passionately about net neutrality in his TechCrunch column, possibly not see this?

Anyway, all this is a preamble for where I want to take this, because while these ethical issues are central to the trust between writers and readers, the economics of the web are goverened by another conflict, one that is very rarely talked about. I'd like to get it out there.

Here's the story...

1. Google makes a lot of money from advertising.

2. If one were to define advertising, it seems to me you'd have to include the idea of intrusion. An ad intrudes on your experience, it's a sidebar, it's something you wouldn't think of on your own. If you're already humming my jingle, I don't have to pay someone to play it for you. Or so it seems.

3. As search gets better, it will obviate the need for intrusion. A perfectly targeted ad at some point stops being intrusive and starts becoming information. If you get me the commercial fact that I need at precisely the moment I need it, you don't have to impose on me, I will welcome that.

4. Google is in the business of getting you the exact fact or link that you're looking for as quickly as possible.

5. Its advertisers pay money to get you their link before you find one in the search results.

6. But if they're the same link, maybe the advertiser will stop paying? Or if the customer believes that a better link is in the first search results rather than on page 5 or not there at all? The customer, perfectly happy, never has a reason to go where the ads direct them.

Now, I know that there are other forms of advertising, ones that program you to think a certain way, but you don't see those kinds of ads on Google. Maybe they'll have to change, because as the search engine gets better and better, which it should (right?) the ads will play less of a role.

We know that companies don't always play fair.

There was the case of GM sabotaging the public transit system in Los Angeles.

A lot of companies profited from the war in Iraq. If you don't believe they helped get that war going, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Special price. Just for you.

Closer to home, the recent price drop in laptops, the netbooks, show that there was some kind of price fixing going on before that, a collusion between the vendors to keep prices high. So we know that the tech industry is capable of the same dirty economics as other industries.

When Google has to cut its own revenue stream by enhancing search, will they do it? So far the competition has made this easy for them, but just this week Wolfram Research has been wooing the analysts with their new way to do search. Maybe this isn't the challenger that will push Google to seriously upgrade search, if not, surely at some point it will happen.

I don't know how you feel, but it seems to me that search has been pretty constant for the last few years. It's been a long time since the quantum improvement that Google offered over Infoseek, Alta Vista, et al.

New iPhone

Sun, 03 May 2009 19:22:44 GMT

It was raining on Friday, and I went for a long walk up and down the hills, very vigorous -- but I got soaked and so did my iPhone. After taking its last picture and uploading it to Flickr, it died. It wouldn't respond to attempts to revive it, so I took it down to the AT&T Store in downtown Berkeley and bought a replacement for $199.

My old iPhone truly was old, this bright shiny new one is so much nicer -- and faster. And the restore process worked flawlessly. Everything from the old phone was backed up on my Mac, and when I inserted the new one it asked if I wanted to restore it from the old image. I said yes. It took a long time, but I lost nothing, except passwords, which is the right way for it to work.

So now I have a new iPhone and where almost everything was broken on the old one, nothing is broken on this one. So the iPod functions work, and it can play videos -- the old one couldn't do eitehr of these things. All my headphones work with the new one, the old one had a non-standard jack for headphones (yes, I know I could get an adapter, but I can't manage to keep track of things like that, it was pointless).

But I still want to bring a music/video player with me because the iPhone, apparently -- can't multitask! If I'm watching a movie and it's going through a boring spell, or I just want to listen to the dialog, why can't I check my email or Twitter -- or look something up on Google? When I use my laptop I can do all these things and watch a movie.

And I'm reminded how shitty the keyboard is on the iPhone, and think it's a paradox that Apple's COO says netbooks have "cramped" keyboards. The iPod has the worst keyboard. Even if I type something correctly, there's a pretty good chance it'll change it to something ridiculous. When the Newton first came out people used to laugh at how it would mess things up. The iPod really isn't much better, but people stopped laughing. I wonder why? Cook is wrong -- my Eee PC has an infintely better keyboard than the iPhone, and you know something -- it costs less than an iPhone too.

Anyway -- net-net -- it's a nice new toy to have. In a way I'm glad the old one broke.