“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” So begins a column by Jessica Vascellaro in today’s WSJ.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

[...]

Years ago, we were frustrated if it took a few days for a letter to arrive. A couple of years ago, we’d complain about a half-hour delay in getting an email. Today, we gripe about it taking an extra few seconds for a text message to go through. In a few months, we may be complaining that our cellphones aren’t automatically able to send messages to friends within a certain distance, letting them know we’re nearby. (A number of services already do this.)

These new services also make communicating more frequent and informal—more like a blog comment or a throwaway aside, rather than a crafted email sent to one person. No need to spend time writing a long email to your half-dozen closest friends about how your vacation went. Now those friends, if they’re interested, can watch it unfold in real time online. Instead of sending a few emails a week to a handful of friends, you can send dozens of messages a day to hundreds of people who know you, or just barely do.

[...]

David Liu, an executive at AOL, calls it replacing the in-box with “a river that continues to flow as you dip into it.”

I’m more “wired” than most, spending an inordinate amount of time blogging, Twittering and the like.   Indeed, I started this blog nearly seven years ago as a substitute for my previous habit of emailing links and clippings, often with brief commentary, back and forth my my friends.  I frequently instant message or direct message people for things that need immediate responses.

But none of it is going to replace email.

A river of information is interesting.  It’s why I finally “stuck” as an active Twitter user after two years of brief flirtations and not “getting” it.  But, even if you’re only following 100 people or so, you’re going to miss most of what’s in the river. And if you’re following 1000 or 2000 people — hardly uncommon — you’re going to miss almost all of it.  Which is perfectly fine if you’re looking for witty commentary, updates on the latest breaking news, which of your acquaintances out and about in Adams Morgan, and the like.

While it can be used that way, email isn’t, at its core, a mass communications platform.  It’s a means of direct communication with another person asynchronously.  If I need to let my wife know I’m running late, send my deputy an attachment for posting on the company website, send my folks the latest pictures of the baby, or any number of things that I actually need another person to read — not just have available to them if they happen to be wading in my river at a given moment — there’s no good substitute for email.

Twitter direct messaging is great if you can say what you need in 160 characters, including spaces, and the person’s following you on Twitter; otherwise, not so much. Texting is rather intrusive and, since it tends to set off audible alarms and cost the recipient money, borderline rude.  Instant messaging is also generally annoying, as it demands a person’s attention NOW rather than when they want to take the time to read messages.  Ditto telephoning, which I now reserve almost exclusively for extended conversations with friends and family a long distance away, quick bursts for when I can’t wait for email, or certain types of business transactions.

I haven’t yet used Google’s Wave, which may streamline the current flow of the river and avoid some of the fallbacks of the email alternatives.  The way we’ll use email will continue to evolve, too, much as I’ll now send someone to a blog post or an online photo album.  But we’ll always need something like email:  a direct, asynchronous means of sending infinitely variable types of information to specific people.

Update (Alex Knapp): Reading the above, I would just note that this is one in a string of articles over the past few years about the death of email, the death of voicemail, the death of the telephone, etc. These pieces tend to have one thing in common: they are written by tech journalists who, in their day to day business, are sifting through the constant stream of information on the Internet. You will note that they are almost never written by people with jobs outside of that industry, because everyone else with an office job gets more email and voicemail and phone calls than they can handle without investing in any one of the number of time management programs like Getting Things Done, etc. Speaking for myself, if email is dead, why do I get 100+ of them a day? And why are they communications that really can’t be handled any other way? If the phone is dead, why do I spend so much time on it getting work done?

Before proclaiming the death of a particular type of communication, it would be nice if journalists of this ilk actually did some, you know, reporting from a regular office and not just their laptop at home.

Related controversies roiling the blogosphere today point to the dark side of American politics.

First, NewsMax ran an article by a John L. Perry titled “Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention.’” It has apparently been removed from the site (it’s now directing to the home page and isn’t showing along with the author’s other pieces) but the excerpt says “There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem.’ Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic. — America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized.”  TPM has the full text.  Here’s a further taste:

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Then, a Times of London editorial by Gore Vidal predicts “We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Finally, Thomas Friedman points to a Facebook poll that asked, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” Says Friedman:

The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

Now, Friedman is overreacting a touch here to a poll on an Internet site with millions of members who are pretty much free to post anything they want.  Then again, seeing broad trends in a single anecdote is what he does.

But his larger point nonetheless has merit.  The mass political debate, as evidenced by the blogs, talk radio, talk TV, townhall meetings, and various other venues certainly seems to be increasingly vitriolic, ill tempered, and divided.  Gone are the days when those on the other side of a given political dispute were honorable fellow countrymen with different priorities; there are only those who agree and selfish, unpatriotic, evil people.

Steve Rubel offers “Three Tips for Managing the Stream Before it Manages You.” Between email, blog feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and various other applications out there, we’ve all got too much information to contend with. Those of us in the information business are even more overwhelmed because we both need to follow more things and figure out how to aggregate it usefully.

The first and last tips — relying on one or two aggregators and reading saved materials on your portable devices while stuck waiting — are things I try to do now, although not all that successfully or consistently. The second, though, is really intriguing:

Don’t Subscribe and Read, Archive, Search and Skim

In the personal productivity world,  some eschew sorting documents and emails in folders in favor of just throwing them into an archive where they can be easily searched later. The same approach works well for managing your stream.

Use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to lots of content, including say all your friends on Twitter. However, view it as a personal, searchable database rather than another collection bucket you have to read and clear.

I do in fact use Google Reader to search for posts of bloggers I trust when I’m doing a roundup-style post.  And I frequently “mark all as read” to avoid a sense that I have hundreds more posts that I must get through.

At the same time, though, skimming blog posts and reading clicked links is one of the major ways in which I get ideas for posts.   I noted that in Steve’s comments and he responded, “I divide my feeds up. Some I read for that same purpose, others I archive and search.”

I’ve done that with Twitter, creating a group in TweetDeck for the people whose tweets I really want to read to distinguish those whom I merely follow out of courtesy.  I’ve divided most of my blog feeds in Google Reader into folders (Must Read, Europe, Security, Business, Sports, Blogging and Tech, etc.) but haven’t actually gotten into the habit of using them vice just starting with the most recent and skimming down until I get bored.

Image via Zee on TheNextWeb.com

GQ has a rather weird piece about something that may or may not be a trend:  High school kids using the Internet to extort sexual favors.  This one has a twist, which I’ll lot Conor Friedersdorf summarize:

Tony Stancl, an 18 year old high school senior who created a fake female identity on Facebook, flirted with male classmates by Internet chat, and successfully encouraged hundreds of them to send along naked photographs. These he kept on his computer. The unluckiest victims were subsequently blackmailed. The made up female would threaten to release the photographs unless the boys performed oral or anal sex on “my friend Tony.” Some boys agreed, and allowed that to be photographed too.

Conor has an excellent disquisition on the culture that allows high schoolers to casually get photographed nude and send said pics to complete strangers.  It’s worth reading.

My thoughts upon reading his precis, however, were not so much to the issue of the photographs per se but the fact that some significant number of high school boys allowed themselves to be blackmailed into gay sex rather than have nude photographs of themselves revealed.    Let’s just say my reaction precisely mirrored that which President Obama would have upon being told additional troops were needed in Afghanistan.

Copyblogger’s Brian Clark has noticed a distinction developing between blogs on the one hand and “social media” on the other.  He rightly notes that “blogs were the first modern form of social media” and thus the distinction is artificial.

My sense is that, blogs are indeed social media, they’re definitely of a different piece than Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatnot. The “new” social media are generally more interactive but less driven by original content.

Most blogs have evolved beyond being literal logs of what we see on the Web (InstaPundit is one of the few of those that have remained wildly popular and, ironically, Glenn closed off comments years ago) and are essentially self-published magazines or columns.  Indeed, while commenting and cross-blog discussion remain part of the blog experience, it’s not always clear that they’re “social” in any sense other than ordinary folks being able to publish their ideas without clearance from gatekeepers.

Conversely, Twitter is mostly a platform for passing along links to other content — including blogs — as well as snappy observations. Facebook is about messaging people in one’s network, organizing gatherings, and finding amusements in such things as zombie wars and movie quizzes. I’m not sure what MySpace is about; as best I can gather, it’s an homage to the Web circa 1997, with garish designs, music that blares as soon as one enters the page, and other annoyances that the rest of the Internet has thankfully left behind.

Via Twitter, James Poulos passes along an interesting piece by Conor Friedersdorf titled “Iran, Twitter, and The American Information Elite.”  Basically, he noticed over the weekend that all of his blogger/journalist friends were intensely aware of what was happening in Iran whereas other well educated people he encountered hadn’t the slightest clue.

I can’t help noticing that information elites are able to process breaking news and form political opinions about it faster than ever before (see the Feiler Faster thesis as told by Mickey Kaus); that these folks are blogging and Tweeting their policy suggestions and demands almost immediately; and that due to arguably dubious strategic political considerations, all of Congress seems to be getting on Twitter.

Are we approaching a point where political information is processed so fast that an event happens, information elites weigh in to shape the discourse surrounding it, the conventional wisdom is communicated to Congress, and elected leaders formulate reactions based on public opinion… all before most of even the formerly plugged in members of the public ever learn what on earth is going on, or have a chance to form an opinion? Is anyone who works at a company that blocks their Facebook feed going to be meaningfully disadvantaged in the political process? Egalitarian concerns aside, are the information elites going to set a course, ossify as they always do in their opinions, and influence the nation’s course too hastily? Are we on course for a kind of political singularity?

An interesting set of questions.  Having been blogging virtually daily for the past six and a half years, the way I process and consume information has changed considerably.  Things become “old news” very quickly, so the pressure to form a strong opinion in real time is the nature of the enterprise.

I tend to start the day with Gmail and Google Reader, even on the weekends, and so processed dozens of blog posts on the subject of the Iran mess over the weekend.  Because I do most of my foreign affairs blogging at the Atlantic Council these days and 1) the topic is a bit outside our baliwick,  2) the blog I’ve developed there is aimed at providing something akin to expert analysis, and 3) having a 5-month-old means less time for writing on weekend mornings, I just read and thought about things and got around to writing Monday.

Iran’s Elections: What We Know (And What We Don’t) and Iran’s Elections: What Now? are almost surely better posts than I’d have dashed off Saturday.  But Conor’s right:  The prevailing opinion that the Iranian elections had been stolen was already formed by then and it’s reasonable to presume that the early deciders will shape the opinions of those catching up later in the week.

In half a day after mentioning his Facebook page on CNN this morning, US General Ray Odierno’s supporters have increased by an order of magnitude:

It did not take long for Facebook users to respond to U.S. General Ray Odierno’s Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.

In less than seven hours, Odierno has increased the number of “supporters” connected to his new Facebook page by more than a factor of ten.

When his CNN interview initially aired Sunday morning, Odierno had roughly 70 followers on the social networking site and by Sunday afternoon, the general has nearly 900.

I checked a short while ago and he was approaching 1,300.

Firms spend millions and go through a lot to keep their workers from goofing off on the Internet.  That may not be such a good idea:

Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It’ll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.

The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not. Study author Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing, said “workplace Internet leisure browsing,” or WILB, helped to sharpened workers’ concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration,” Coker said on the university’s website (www.unimelb.edu.au/) “Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days’ work, and as a result, increased productivity,” he said.

Since I’ve always simply presumed this to be the case — at least for those whose jobs are primarily intellectual — it’s hard to dub this finding “counterintuitive.”   And, it should be stressed, this finding holds true only up to a point.

However, Coker said the study looked at people who browsed in moderation, or were on the Internet for less than 20 percent of their total time in the office. “Those who behave with Internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without,” he said.

Shocking.

Hat tip: DrewM. Photo by Flickr user tueexperto, used under Creative Commons license.

Rand Fishking and Darren Rowse have noted a remarkable decline in the social nature of blogs, most notably the culture of inter-linking, and think Twitter and other social media outlets may be partly to blame.

In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn’t uncommon for a few hundred small & mid-size blogs & news sites to pick up a story, add their thoughts and create links. Today, even very popular pieces of content in the technology sphere are lucky to have two dozen blogs and traditional websites write about them. What’s happened? Darren and I proposed a few potential theories:

• Blogging has become less about sharing with your network and more about building up your own importance/business, so linking and covering the works of your peers, unless it gets you something, has limited viability. Bloggers are more professional, more self-focused and find less value in linking to/covering what others produce.
• Blogging, at least in the “bleeding edge” technology fields (social media, SEO, webdev, etc.) is not as popular as it once was. While this might be a hard argument to make, there’s certainly some circumstanstial evidence – just look at my list of SEO blogs from 2006 and 2007 – there is an undeniably smaller amount of content being produced by many of these folks.
• Twitter is cannibalizing blogging. People who previously might have blogged about a site/news article/clever piece of linkbait are simply tweeting it, and save their blog posts for more comprehensive essays and broader subjects.

They offer a bit of data to support their thesis but admit that it’s rough.

Based on my own observations — and I’m only casually involved with Twitter, Facebook, and other non-blog social media outlets — the first of these bullets strikes me as more plausible than the others.

The professionalization of blogging and the rise of automatic aggregators has shaken out the pocket-Glenn Reynolds types, leaving essayists and discussion leaders in the ascendency.  Most of the “serious” blogs now create quasi-unique content and/or (as this post is attempting to do) bring attention to content from outside their niche into a wider discussion.

The hundreds of blogs that once existed mostly as true web logs — i.e., mostly just pointing to content elsewhere that the proprietor finds interesting — have mostly withered away. There’s just not a market for them (perhaps because the professional bloggers are cranking out too much content and people don’t have time to read anything else.)  It’s quite plausible that those folks have moved in to Twitter.

The second part of that first bullet is right, too.  The linking culture that still persists on political blogs is much less common in other niches.  Although I’m no longer actively posting, I own celebrity and sports blogs and there’s virtually no tradition of source acknowledgment in those sub-spheres.  Celebrity blogs in particular generally pass off cut-and-paste content from elsewhere as their own.

Photo by Flickr user HGruber, used under Creative Commons license.

TAP’s Adam Serwer and TPM’s David Kurtz independently report that ABC’s Jake Tapper has blocked them from following his Twitter feed. They note the irony that a journalist who expects politicians to be transparent is doing this.

I happen to follow Tapper — and am apparently not important enough to block — and see that he has unblocked TPM and that he’s engaged in tweets the last couple of hours about “rudeness” on his feed. Steve Benen suggests that said “rudeness” was a snarky comment Serwer posted on his blog directed at Tapper and offers his view that “blocking those who offer mild criticism seems kind of petty.”

Whatever. Frankly, Tapper has 5197 followers and he can block whoever he likes.   I have a mere 736 followers and don’t block anyone unless they’re obvious spammers.

The forgoing is a rather long and diversionary setup for what this post is actually about, inspired by the headlines of Benen’s (”Tapper, Twitter, and Online Etiquette”) and Serwer’s (”This Feed is Closed to the Press”) posts displayed at memeorandum.   Namely, what exactly is the etiquette of Twitter if you’re a journalist?

Is Twitter a semi-private conversation between friends? Or is it considered a public forum similar to a blog post?

Given the nature of the media, I don’t post anything on Twitter or Facebook that I expect to be private. Then again, I mostly use social media to push blog posts and glean information for writing blog posts.

But people younger than I tend to use these fora to “microblog” every inane thought that pops into their head.  Are such tweets fair game for publication?  If so, Tapper is quite right to block any follower who might be inclined to embarrass him with some half-baked thought he dashed off while waiting in line at the Starbucks.

Perhaps Twitter needs to have some sort of journalistic code wherein individual users can specify how their Tweets are to be treated?

Jon Favreau, the 27-year-old speechwriter to Barack Obama, was photographed with his hand on the, er, lower shoulder of a cardboard cutout of Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton.  Dee Dee Myers, for one, is not amused.

My friends from college and in the years just beyond can testify that I did some things then that I wouldn’t want to see on the Internet now. But I had a big job in the White House at a young age too; at 31—just a few years older than Favreau is now—I became White House press secretary. And I knew instantly that the rules had changed for me, that I could no longer go to all the parties of the people just a little younger than me, who had just a little less responsibility, and expect to be anonymous. Clearly, Favreau should have understood that too. If he’s old enough and wise enough and mature enough to write for the president of the United States—and not just any president but one who seems poised to take words more seriously than any since Abraham Lincoln—than he’s clearly old enough and wise enough and mature enough to avoid getting his picture taken behaving in a way that is embarrassing to him, his boss, the secretary of state–designate, his family, and, one hopes, a majority of 27-year-old males (though that may be too optimistic.) It’s indefensible. But that’s still not what’s bugging me.

What’s bugging me is his intention. He isn’t putting his hand on her “chest,” as most of the articles and conversations about the picture have euphemistically referred to it. Rather, his hand—cupped just so—is clearly intended to signal that he’s groping her breast. And why? Surely, not to signal he finds her attractive. Au contraire. It’s an act of deliberate humiliation. Of disempowerment. Of denigration.

[...]

At what point does sexist behavior get taken seriously? At what point do people get punished in ways that suggest this kind of behavior, this kind of thinking, is unacceptable? At what point do we insist there will be consequences?

I fully agree that Favreau is old enough and, more importantly, is in a position of sufficient prestige and responsibility to know better than this.  The photo is clearly posed.  He wasn’t caught on camera doing something stupid — the camera was reason he was doing what he was doing.  Judging by his friend’s expression and accoutrement, I’m guessing alcohol was involved.

But it strikes me that Myer’s “disgust” over the symbolism here is grossly overblown.  Not just because, as Bruce McQuain suggests, Myers gave Bill Clinton a pass for conduct far more offensive and demeaning to women (hint: Clinton will significantly outrank Favreau).  Sometimes, behavior is impulsive rather than calculating.  For 20-somethings in the company of other 20-somethings, especially when under the influence of intoxicants, “sometimes” can be upgraded to “usually.”

I don’t want to give Favreau too much of a pass for being a dumb kid. When I was 27, I was two years removed from leading soldiers in a combat zone and just back to graduate school.  On the other hand, the World Wide Web was a year away from being a reality and Facebook and MySpace and other such venues were a decade or more into the future.  People of his age seem to have far less compunction about being photographed behaving like idiots and sharing said evidence with the world.

If Obama wants to fire this guy for being a dumbass and embarrassing himself and his boss, that’s fine by me.  If he doesn’t, though, it’s not a signal that he’s indifferent to sexism but rather that he doesn’t think groping a cardboard cutout is a hanging offense.

UPDATE: Discussion over this one is heating up.   Stacy McCain is “tired of seeing careers in Washington destroyed by one ginned-up ‘incident.’”  Moreover,

As a conservative, I am grateful to Jonathan Favreau for (unintentionally) exposing the partisan double standards of media outrage about “sexism” — the scare-quotes signifying that I don’t think Favreau is any more “sexist” than anyone else. And if someone out there has a Facebook photo of a Hillary Clinton staffer acting disrespectfully toward a cardboard cutout of Obama, please publish it, so that we can discuss “racism” in the same context.

Ed Morrissey, meanwhile, awards Myers the “Captain Louis Renault Award, with a special Irony Cluster for her article’s appearance on the pages of Vanity Fair with Kate Winslet’s naked butt and another pic of four women lying in a tableau that looks like a modern-day harem.”

At what point does sexist behavior get taken seriously?  At about the point when the Ds change to Rs, which Myers concedes later in the piece.  But seriously, is Myers kidding?  For which administration did she work, anyway?

[...]

Not a commendable moment, perhaps, but it’s a joke.  Really, have we become such pantywaists that we can’t tell the difference between a joke and “denigration”, “disempowerment”, and “humiliation”?  I’d suggest that one bright line would be whether a live person was being fondled or a cardboard cutout.

A not unreasonable distinction, to be sure.
via Memeorandum

Kathleen Parker seems vaguely annoyed by the Twitter phenomenon.

Shorter than a blog posting, a “tweet” consists of a concise sentence or two and essentially answers the question: What are you doing?

[...]

On Planet Facebook, nothing in one’s life is not worth mentioning. To what end, one can only surmise. I am, therefore I am, therefore I am. But what are friends for, if not to feign interest in what’s not the least bit interesting?

Serious twitter subscribers expect more than a mood update, I’m told, and presumably won’t stick around long for less. Or will they? I recently created an account at Twitter.com. Nary a tweet have I posted thus far, yet already I have a dozen subscribers.

Parker’s mildly famous and says interesting things; a handful of subscribers are just a sign that people are curious.  I’ve had a Twitter account for months, which I use mostly to push OTB and New Atlanticist posts and have 357 followers.

I’m only following 95 people but, in all honestly, am “following” them in the same sense that I’m quite sure a sizable number of my “followers” are “following” me:  Not very closely.   Here’s what they’re saying right now:

	nprpolitics NPR.org will have a live stream of Obama’s introduction of Bill Richardson as his Commerce Secretary nominee in about 10 minutes. @acarvin 4 minutes ago from web
	FP_Passport Report: Obama to inherit broken national security system: Five-plus years after the invasion of Ira.. http://tinyurl.com/5ptes2 6 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	stinson Here’s another reason why I stopped teaching at uni here. RT @sinosplice New blog post: English Essay Templates http://tinyurl.com/5e87mf 11 minutes ago from web
	MichaelTurk @seanhackbarth Based on the discussions I had about Newsweek/WaPo last night, I don’t believe so. 12 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to seanhackbarth
	stinson Dems worried about leadership? http://tinyurl.com/5pjf52 Maybe it’s because Congress will still be deeply unpopular once Bush leaves office. 14 minutes ago from web
	chrisabraham Bookmarked The Polus Center for Social and Economic Development http://is.gd/a3Ha 14 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	chrisabraham Dugg 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter http://is.gd/a3H7 14 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	poliblogger Speaking of Twitter…: http://tinyurl.com/6ymh7z 17 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	poliblogger The Twitter Revolution?: Just shy of four years ago I wrote: While I have no doubt that there is an i.. http://tinyurl.com/5u8krd 17 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	bfrist Blog: Letter from Cross Cultural Solutions Fellow: Thailand: I was a world away, in more ways than on.. http://tinyurl.com/6khcjt 17 minutes ago from twitterfeed
	seanhackbarth @MichaelTurk Has Blip.tv finally made their embedable player journalist/idiot proof? 22 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to MichaelTurk
	bloggingheads Dan Drezner & Heather Hurlburt on the “#mumbai as India’s 9/11″ meme. video: http://tinyurl.com/5cro3x 23 minutes ago from web

It turns out that, by very carefully chosing whom one “follows,” there’s a sizable amount of good information available. At least half those tweets have info worth my checking out and about half the rest are mildly interesting.

Still, like Steven Taylor, I only “half-get” Twitter myself.  While I check email too often, I just haven’t made it a priority to check my tweets with any regularity and I’ve made a couple of concerted efforts to be more engaged in the community and found it not worth the tremendous time investment.    Steven’s also right that mainstream coverage of these technological “revolutions” are ridiculously overblown.

As if to prove Robert Heinlein correct, the House Administration Committee is, apparently with honorable intent, considering effectively banning the use of popular social media sites, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook by Members.

Soren Dayton couches this in partisan terms: “In typical fashion, House Democrats are trying to pass rules that stifle debate and require regulation.” In fact, though, it appears that existing rules are being interpreted by some to preclude Members from posting on these sites and the current effort is to address that.

The Franking Commission, created to govern how Congress used their right to mail letters to constituents for free, apparently “frowns on official links to campaign-related Web sites, political parties, advocacy groups and ‘any site the primary purpose of which is the conduct of commerce.’” That’s understandable, if highly problematic in the current communications environment.

Aaron Brazell posts a letter from Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Massachusetts 8th) to HAC Chairman Robert Brady suggesting a workaround, noting for example that the “existing tools available within the House to [post videos] are not user-friendly or efficient, and that in addition, server space withn the House is currently insufficient to meet the growing demand for video.”  He proposes a series of guidelines to solve this problem:

• Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;
• To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.
• Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.
• CHA, the Office of Web Assistance (OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

The partisan angle is being pushed especially hard by Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) who, as Mike Masnick puts it, has “been using Twitter to ignite a totally misguided partisan war, pretending (falsely) that Democrats are trying to prevent him from using Twitter.”  Indeed, Culberson’s name, which I must admit I can’t recall previously having heard, appears in virtually every blog post I’ve seen on the subject.

Masnick appears to be right that Capuano is trying to “make it easier to post content on various social media sites.”  But the rules are so hamhanded that they’ll make things harder.  Jesse Stay points out that, “this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.”

Mark Safranski also heard from Culberson and found him persuasive, largely because Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to reimpose the so-called Fairness Doctrine. He figures, “The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted.” Leaving aside the partisan angle, though and we’re still left with a really bad idea.

[O]n the technological merits alone this may be the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve heard of regarding the internet coming out of Congress in a long, long, time. The dinosaurs who are uncomfortable with computers, the unwashed masses being aware of their actions and free political debate want to turn the clock back to the 1970’s. Except during the 1970’s no one would have dared to propose controlling what  a democratically elected member of Congress could say to their constituents. Doesn’t it register in the Beltway that they are talking about public information that already belongs to the people of the United States? Senators and Congressmen should be interacting with citizens more freely, not less; the U.S. Congress needs radical transparency, not greater opacity imposed by the Democratic House leadership to better hide shady dealings.

It’s a brazenly Orwellian and most likely unconstitutional power grab by the Speaker of the House unlike anything dreamed of by any previous speaker – not Sam Rayburn, not Joseph Cannon. Nobody.

Ed Morrissey has a source (i.e., a flack sending out press releases to friendly bloggers) who says that Diane Feinstein is pushing a similar proposal in the Senate that would have “the Senate Rules Committee would become the Internet speech police for everyone in the Senate.”  Ed says this could have all manner of negative and far-reaching consequences.

David All passes along a message from House Minority Leader John Boehner which says, in part,

If the proposed rule is adopted, the free flow of information over the Internet between Americans and their representatives will be significantly curtailed. Americans who currently use free websites like YouTube to obtain uncensored daily information about congressional policy debates will instead be forced to go to websites “approved” by the House Administration Committee in order to continue getting such information. This would amount to new government censorship of the Internet, by a panel of federal officials that is neither neutral nor independent.

Interestingly, All contends, “not a single complaint had ever been filed against a Member of Congress for their web-use.”

One presumes that the net outcome of all this attention will be that Members are officially allowed to use social media outlets precisely as they’re already doing and that a handful more people will have heard of John Culberson.

Blogger Brian Beutler was shot in DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood Monday night, Greg Sargent reports for TPM.

Brian Beutler, a well-known progressive blogger, was shot and seriously injured during a mugging last night in Washington, D.C.

One bullet damaged Beutler’s spleen, and he had it removed during surgery this morning at the Washington Hospital Center. He’s expected to make a “pre-trauma” recovery, which is to say, a completely full recovery.

[...]

It’s unclear as yet what happened, but the man fired several shots at Beutler. One bullet hit him in the spleen and he was hit twice in the shoulder. A D.C. police official said he wasn’t aware of any arrests made in connection with the shooting.

Brian’s friend and colleague Adele Stan reports that he’s in good spirits and cracking jokes.

Other friends in the close-knit DC blogger-journalist community are weighing in as the news filters out. Megan McArdle, who lives nearby (as is well documented in media accounts, all DC bloggers live in flophouses with, or within close proximity to, Matt Yglesias) isn’t surprised given the deplorable state of crime control in the city.  Julian Sanchez resists the urge to profanity and limits himself to noting Brian’s awesomeness and adding his best wishes.

Most of his friends are joining in Brian’s cheerful response to this incident now that it’s clear he’s out of the woods. Dave Weigel titles his post “Now They Call Him 30 Cent” and notes that there’s a Chuck Norris-style list of “Brian Beutler Facts” being collected, including “Lance Armstrong wears a Brian Beutler bracelet” and “Meatloaf would do that for Brian Beutler.”

Steve Clemons is soliciting financial contributions.

I’ve met Brian but probably don’t know him well enough to inquire as to whether he’s now a conservative, which is purportedly what happens to liberals who get mugged.

Jane Hamsher wants to know, “If You Can’t Use a Computer, How Can You Be President?”

I chuckled when I saw the story at memeorandum since, after all, it’s unlikely that any president before Bill Clinton could “use” a computer in any meaningful sense. (Maybe Jimmy Carter, who was a nuclear engineer in a past life, could, too, but proficiency with punch cards probably didn’t come into play very often during his stint in the White House.)

Clicking the link, I see that Jane is echoing an idea put fort by Tracy Russo, who served as John Edwards’ chief blogger. Mark Soohoo, John McCain’s deputy e-campaign manager, who recently said, “You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.”

Jane summarizes Russo’s retort: “Tracy said most emphatically that you do, and that someone who is going to be expected to lead the country through the social, political, economic and communication upheavals that are happening as a result of the changes in computer and online technology very much needs to be able to use one.”

This strikes me as nonsensical. I’d venture that 99.9 percent of daily computer users have no clue whatsoever about said upheavals and that some tiny fraction of those who do has any idea what public policy responses, if any, would be appropriate.

It’s a rare day that I don’t spend twelve hours in front of a computer. Furthermore, studying politics is my livelihood and I’ve been at it for more than a quarter century now. While I’m by no means a power user, I’m on Fark, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn and various other social media outlets more than most. And I’m something of an amateur sociologist, interested very much in cultural changes. Yet, I wouldn’t pretend to any especial expertise in analyzing these “upheavals” of which Russo speaks.

Going out on a limb, I’d also guess that Russo’s in the same boat. She’s a communications professional, field organizer, and fundraiser. I’m guessing that she’s not on the short list for the National Security Council.

Photo: Assistive Technologies