the tweney review

10. You’re not a real person, and you’re just following me as a way to get me to check out your spammy Twitter page and then click through to your adult dating site.

9. Egregious self-promotion: You post tweets about every single blog post you publish. I already have an RSS newsreader, ok?

8. You tweet live blow-by-blows about TV news, or football games, or presidential debates. I don’t mind that you tell me you’re watching something interesting — just don’t try to liveblog it over Twitter. If I wanted to follow the football game, I’d turn on the friggin’ TV.

7. Ninety percent of your tweets are about Twitter itself. Or Facebook. I get it already: Social media are remaking the web, and society. Now can we talk about something else?

6. You’re directing every RSS feed you generate into Twitter. Your Flickr photo, Tumblr blog, linkblog — they’re all shoved into Twitter like ground pork into a sausage casing. Seeing an automatically-generated message that begins “Links for 2008-01-24″ makes me feel like the robots have truly taken over. Next!

5. Your Twittering is so fast and furious I was missing messages from my actual friends.

4. You Twitter about your bodily functions. So your iPhone lets you Twitter while you’re sitting on the can — but I don’t need to know that.

3. You respond to every friggin’ tweet with an @ shout-out. Learn to use D, ok?

2. You’re not following me.

1. I don’t know you.

At Wired, we’ve been experimenting with what we loosely call “open source journalism” in a variety of ways. What we’re learning is that there’s a fairly natural flow from quick blog posts to more fully-cooked news stories, and it works something like this.

A reporter finds out about a breaking news story, and puts a quick blog post up about it. If it’s important enough, we’ll feature that blog post on the home page of Wired.com right away. In the meantime, the reporter will continue working on the story: Calling sources, checking facts, looking for additional details, and thinking through the implications. As she discovers new information, she’ll post it to the blog, either as followup posts or as updates to the original item.

Eventually, for the bigger stories, we accumulate a series of blog posts with a fair amount of original reporting in them. This can happen over the course of a morning, a day, or even a couple of weeks. At the same time, we start getting comments on the posts, and occasionally those comments have additional information that leads us in new directions. (We do read, and sometimes respond to, all our comments.)

At this point, we can write a full-blown news story, incorporating much of the reporting and even the copy from the blog posts, while adding context, analysis, and a more standard news story structure.

The result is that readers can read any of Wired’s 10 active news blogs to get up-to-the-minute, relatively unfiltered news reporting, almost as fast as we do it. Or you can follow Wired’s home page (or our Top Stories RSS feed) to get a slower, more filtered, more “cooked” news feed.

This process has worked well for us in covering some big stories, such as the Digg user revolt of May 2007, the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007, the iPhone launch, and coverage of a variety of industry conferences. We also use it almost daily, on a host of smaller stories.

But it’s not fast enough. For some people, even the blogs are too slow. That’s why a number of us in the Wired newsroom are starting to use Twitter, Facebook, and other social software to post about news stories we’re working on, even before we’ve blogged about them.

I’m making my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages public, and other reporters are, too. I’ve also created a Facebook group for the tech business news beat that I oversee — it’s called The Epicenter, and it’s open to anyone who is interested in news about the tech business.

It’s all very experimental, and I’m not sure yet which media are going to work best for long-term communication and collaboration on the news. But my goal is to make something explicit about my work that has actually been true for my entire career: I’m not just a source of information, I’m also a hub for information, a conduit for facilitating the flow of news and perspective.

I’ll see you online.

UPDATE: Scott Karp has an interesting article on this topic called “Can Blogs Do Journalism?” The answer, of course, is yes, and not surprisingly, blog publishers are discovering that daily news and print journalists make pretty good bloggers.

I’ve been playing with an iPhone all weekend, and I haven’t had this much fun with a gadget in a long time. Is it useful? You bet. No phone does web browsing or email quite as well as this one. Plus it’s a great music player, video player, and photo browser, and it’s got tons of other features. But it’s not exactly a productivity tool: If you’re expecting to edit web pages, write long emails, or work on office documents, you’re looking at the wrong phone. It’s more of a lifestyle phone: Like iLife for your pocket. All you Mac fans will know what I’m talking about.

Check out my full reviews (and the rest of Wired News’ iPhone reviews) on Gadget Lab.

One of the best discoveries I made at the Yuri’s Night party at NASA Ames a couple months ago was the Space Cowboys, a group of people with a modified Mercedes-Benz Unimog — it looks like a military vehicle — that they’ve turned into a self-contained, mobile, fully street-legal dance machine. Once parked, projection panels swing out from the sides, an array of big speakers get unloaded, a DJ climbs inside, and the music starts pumping. It’s an amazing thing to see and had me totally transfixed once it came to life.

Among other things the Cowboys’ website has a bunch of dance mix tracks, including this insane mix from Nick Thayer, who I’ve never heard of before, but which I’ve been listening to constantly for the past couple of weeks. (There is an incredible remix of “Another One Bites the Dust” from about 11:00 to around 15:00 in this hourlong MP3. Think Queen, but with more cowbell. Absolutely worth the download just for that.)

With Burning Man coming up at the end of the summer the Unimog seems to be popping up at one fundraiser after another, but one, scheduled for 8pm to 2am in Oakland on Saturday, June 9, looks pretty damn cool: It’s a party to raise money for the “Steampunk Treehouse”, a giant, metal, steam-huffing, fantasy Victorian tree in the spirit of the Neverwas Haul. In addition to the Unimog there will also be appearances by One Man Banjo, who does this kind of swamp funk Tom Waits-y banjo show, and what appear to be a bunch of fire arts performers, and no doubt a bunch of other cool stuff. Details at the Steampunk Treehouse site.

That modest subject is what I was asked to speak about, yesterday at the meeting of OCLC’s RLG Programs group in Washington, DC. My presentation gave a quick overview of the web, covered the current state of information management on the internet (focusing on social media, tagging, and the search market) and made some predictions about what the next five years will bring. And, I finished by exhorting the librarians in the audience — the heads of many major academics research libraries — to make their electronic databases more interoperable with web applications via RSS and XML-based web services, and to digitize their print collections, by any means necessary.

If you’re interested, you can download the full presentation (PPT, 13.5MB). You can read my speaker notes (RTF, 64KB). Or you can get my presentation as a PDF, or an MP3 of the Q&A, from RLG’s web site.

And if you’re really in a hurry, you can read the quick, bullet-point version of my main points, right here:

• The amount of information available online is growing exponentially.
• Meanwhile, our vocabulary for retrieving information has diminished (one-box text search fields, like Google).
• Prediction: By 2012, almost all information will have migrated online, and what hasn’t will be increasingly marginal for the vast majority of users. And, we’ll still be using one-box, one-click search tools.
• How will we organize all this information? Collectively, via social media sites, collaborative tagging, and voting.
• Prediction: By 2012, Wikipedia will be the dominant reference point for the organization of online knowledge. Tagging and voting will be the primary means of sorting that knowledge.
• Prediction: By 2012, online desktops will be primary, and we’ll access them via a variety of devices. Interoperability with these desktops will be crucial for every application.
• Prediction: By 2012, the demand for speed will have turned all publishers into de facto bloggers, and all search engines into Google. (actually already happening)
• Statement: The explosion of socially-organized culture is an opportunity for libraries. This culture needs libraries (and librarians). But the window of opportunity is closing.
• What the information universe wants: A hackable library database.
• What the information universe wants: The books.
• We want you to DIGITIZE YOUR BOOKS. Sort out the copyright concerns later, and get scanning now, by any means necessary — by recruiting users, if you can, the way YouTube recruits users to digitize and upload videos.

Getting even simple things done with a slightly underpowered computer and a bunch of web-based applications means you spend a lot of time waiting. Waiting for TypePad to publish a post, waiting for Gmail to populate the screen with a list of the latest messages, waiting for an image to download so you can start editing it in Photoshop, waiting for Photoshop to launch.

Each of these delays is tiny, maybe on the order of five to twenty seconds, or a minute at the most: Delays which, taken individually, are negligible. But over the course of a day, they accumulate, not literally but psychologically, so you start thinking: What else can I do while I wait for this Ajax-ified web page to load? So you flip to another tab, or jump over to your email program, or respond to someone’s IM.

The result: A five-minute task (writing and publishing a blog post, for instance) gets spread out over half an hour, interleaved with a bunch of other micro tasks, because that five minute task contains half a dozen annoying little delays that you’d rather avoid.

Your computer has trained you to become a task-switcher. It has trained you to spread your attention out across multiple tasks simultaneously, devoting only a little time to each one in turn.

This is a major design flaw in all modern computers, because the computers are designed to provide beautiful, translucent, animated interfaces, not to respond instantaneously to human commands. And, I’m afraid, Web 2.0 style applications are only making it worse.

It seems to be a law of ballpoint pens that the best ones inevitably disappear, leaving behind only inferior writing implements. Thus I have managed, over the past year, to lose three Fisher Space Pens (really the perfect all-purpose pocket pen) while the promising but ultimately disappointing Zebra Tele-scopic has somehow managed to remain in my pocket for months, obstinately not disappearing. And since it comes in a pack of two, I’ve got another one in my drawer as a backup. Argh! The Tele-scopic shrinks down to Space Pen size for pocket transport, while the dual barrel extends, telescope-like, to make a full sized pen when you’re ready to write; at the same time the point cleverly extends. Pushing it back down to shorter length makes the point retract. Neat! Unfortunately the point also seems to work its way out when the barrel is retracted and the pen is riding in my pocket. So far this hasn’t led to any embarrassing ink leaks but it’s annoying. Also the pen is just a touch too skinny and lightweight.

The Tele-scopic’s shortcomings are even more disappointing given that the Zebra F-402 is such a good writing implement — smooth writing, fine line, comfortable grip, and perfect for clipping into a notebook or organizer. Unfortunately both of my F-402s have disappeared too. At this rate I’ll be left only with Rollerballs (smeary, for lefties) and Papermates (blotchy, inconsistent lines and totally un-ergonomic).

I finally found an antidote to the bloated, overgrown, poorly designed mess that is iTunes. It’s a little freeware app called Floola that is just a few megabytes in size and requires no installation, so you can just put the application file on your iPod and run it from there. Floola has a straightforward interface: A simple table lists all of the MP3 files on your iPod, which you can sort by name, album, artist, genre, etc. You can drag and drop MP3 files to and from your hard drive just like you’ve always wanted to, or play music that’s on a Shuffle, which is something iTunes bizarrely refuses to let you do. Best of all, it doesn’t slow your computer to a crawl. Granted, Floola doesn’t have network playlist sharing like ITunes, documentation is almost nonexistent, and it’s buggy, but so far it hasn’t crashed my computer or hosed my music. I’d much rather spend my time with a slightly flaky app that gets the job done than a gigantic, overdesigned monster with identity issues and a not-so-subtle marketing agenda, so I’m ditching ITunes and going with Floola.

Imagine you had a roommate who you’d known for ten years as a somewhat annoying, slightly compulsive, very finicky but ultimately very talented and capable individual. Now, suppose that one day this person showed up wearing completely new, very trendy clothes. A new hairstyle, sort of a New Wave flip, shaved on one side and with a big flop of hair over the left eye. Imagine that he insisted on doing everything different: milk in his coffee when he used to take it black, taking cabs to work instead of the bus, eating raw grains and sushi instead of hamburgers and french fries, switching his keyboard layout to Dvorak, filing things according to Zodiac signs instead of alphabetically. Suppose everything you asked him to do now took him three times longer to complete than before.

Suppose, too, that he insisted on speaking a new language, like Esperanto, whenever possible, although he’d condescend to translate his statements into English when you asked him to. Imagine that he moved all the kitchen cookware to new drawers, hiding some of it in the coat closet, his shoe drawer, or out in the garden under an inverted clay pot. Imagine that he redecorated your apartment in shaded gradients of blue, and replaced all the fixtures and switches with translucent candylike plastic buttons.

Imagine that on top of this he was also asking you to pick up a greater share of the rent, because he’d blown all his money on the new clothes, the sushi, and a feng shui consultant who advised him on where to hide all the cookware.

Would you think this person was merely odd, eccentric, or that he was going through a phase? Maybe he’s finally decided he’s gay, and that’s OK? Would you think, “Hey, it’s a daring new move, and once we all get used to it, we’ll love him even better this way”? Would you applaud his bold new look and try to get used to the new apartment, the slowness, the Esperanto?

Or would you conclude that the guy had gone completely insane?

Content management system. n. A device for moving information from one computer to another computer by means of human manual labor.

(My current working definition.)