Twitter Not Just About Lunch

Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon.  Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks: (1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and another day? You, of course, wouldn't. But that's ...

Twitter Memes

Becks observes, "I suspect many Twitter memes that I find annoying (one letter off movie titles, failed children's books, etc.) would have been quite hilarious Unfogged threads." The post title, "The Medium Is The Message," is appropriate.  Several Twitter memes  (created by adding a hashtag such as #failedchildrensbooks) of the sort mentioned can be amusing if one is in the mood.  ...

Twitter is Dead, Long Live Twitter

Julian Sanchez notes that the rise of Twitter as a hot tool for political communication has killed Twitter the social networking service. After resisting for a while, I finally signed up for Twitter a little over a year ago because it became clear that it was no longer socially optional: My friends were coordinating via Twitter rather than sending around e-mails ...

Twitter Outages

Twitter, the social media tool that's supposed to revolutionize politics, save the Republican Party, and bring freedom to Iran is, yet again, down. Twitter.com is virtually useless but, because the service is open source, dozens of applications have sprung up to make it practical to actually use Twitter.  But these apps, too, continually fail because of limitations brought on by something ...

Blogs ARE Social Media

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. ...

Obama Revamps White House Communications

Danny Glover reports on President Obama's total restructuring of the White House message machine in a piece ominously titled "The Cost of Controlling The Press." Barack Obama's White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or ...

Failure of Breaking News Reporting?

Aaron Brazell argues that, with the advent of instant-reporting of rumor via Twitter and other social media, the mainstream press has fallen behind.  He cites yesterday's Steve McNair murder, the false rumors that Jeff Goldblum had died, and Michael Jackson's death. He laments that, while the McNair news broke on two Nashville stations but "It was a long time (30 minutes ...

Google Not Shut Down! (Shot Down, Maybe)

An inordinate people are coming in to view my four-year-old post "Google Shut Down for 15 Minutes, Thought Hacked."  A couple minutes of digging reveals the likely cause. Michael Arrington reports, in a piece with the odd title "Twitter Mania: Google Got Shut Down. Apple Rumors Heat Up," that there are rumors that Apple is trying to buy Twitter, this ...

Will Twitter Kill the Blogging Star?

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 ...

Twitter Etiquette: Are Tweets Fair Game?

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 ...

Twitter Revolution Will Not be Televised

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 ...

Google Search Moving Web 2.0

Michael Arrington previews what purports to be a prototype of a new Google search experience, incorporating user commenting and voting such as we see on Digg and other social media sites: The video above shows a user interface being bucket tested by Google to select (probably randomly determined) users. Earlier today we showed a screen shot of the interface and a ...

Evolution of Social Media: From Blogger to Twitter

Looking for art to illustrate the previous post, I stumbled on this amusing bit at Dave Schappell's blog: There's some truth to that. . . .

Congressional Twitter Fight Hits NPR

Friend of OTB Aaron Brazell was on NPR very early today talking about the controversy over Congress and social media. The cause of the Twittering representatives has been taken up by bloggers like Aaron Brazell of Technosailor. "Frankly, we're in 2008, and we have a government for the people and by the people," says Brazell, who lives in Baltimore. "Right now, ...

Blogrolls, RIP

Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll. Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today. [...] Unlike other areas of blogging, ...