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 not what Twitter is to most of us.  Despite the query “What are you doing now?” on the posting window, most people that I follow are posting links and commentary on matters of interest to me.    Here’s a screencap of my TweetDeck screen at the moment:

Now, I’m not saying that every single posting there contributes to my net wisdom.  But I get more than enough interesting information to be worth 30-60 minutes of my day scanning, re-tweeting, and posting my own bits.

Lezard seems to think Twitter is mostly about what people are having for lunch and the like.  And for all I know, perhaps it is.  Then again, so is “blogging.”  But just as I don’t read blogs that are mostly about people’s cats or the mundane daily activities of their lives, neither do I actively follow those sorts of Twitter accounts.

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.  The problem is that one gets a huge stream of them from participating people one is following whether one is in the mood or not.  If the latter, then it becomes clutter — if not spam — impeding one’s efforts to glean the sort of information usually imparted by those one follows.  Conversely, a comment discussion on a one-off blog post can be — and generally is — simply skipped over by those not in the mood and once can easily stop reading once one tires of it.

On a related note, the equivalent phenomenon — the widespread adoption of silly applications — has killed Facebook for me.  Once invitations to participate in zombie wars start to outnumber useful messages from friends and others in my network, it ceases to be worth the time.

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 about when and where to grab a few drinks or see a movie. In recent months, as Twitter has exploded as a medium for other kinds of communication, I notice that I seem to be using it less for that original coordinating feature. And a moment of reflection suggests why. Even if you protect your feed, and maintain separate social and professional accounts, there are going to be people in your social world from whom you can’t politely refuse a follow request. Now, the first 20 or so people I had following me on Twitter were more or less coextensive with the group of people I most often see socially, and basically all people I’m perfectly happy to have show up if I announce that I’m out for a beer at such-and-such a place. But let’s face it, there are really only so many friends and acquaintances most of us feel that way about, and so as a service like this is more widely adopted, there are invariably more and more people on that follow list who, while you may like them well enough, you don’t necessarily want to implicitly invite along every time you make plans.

Indeed, I’ve seen prominent Twitterati post tweets complaining about people they’re following cluttering their stream with the details of their personal lives.  That this was the whole point of the service seems to have escaped them.

Then again, I signed up for Twitter a couple years ago and quickly got bored with it because it was mostly banal social interaction. I now find it marginally useful as an information gathering and networking source, albeit one with a higher noise to signal ratio than I’d prefer.

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 called API, which Twitter apparently can’t produce enough of.

If I could only use my phone or check and send email sporadically, I’d be looking for new service providers.  If Twitter can’t solve its problems, I suspect people will flee for a service that can manage to operate.

Of course, since nobody can seem to figure out Twitter’s business model, that may be just as well.

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.

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 nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.

[...]

Although other staffers undoubtedly did work on the White House website and other Internet projects, Bush’s dedicated new media team appears to have consisted of two people-a specialty media director who earned $84,000 a year and a website assistant who earned $34,000. By contrast, Obama has the 11 employees in the Office of Public Engagement and another nine aides with titles such as new media director, new media creative director, deputy director of video and e-mail content/design lead. Those nine earn nearly $700,000 a year combined.

One has to read well into the piece, however, to understand that this is mostly a reshuffle of existing resources:

Overall, Obama is spending about 12 percent more for his communications operation than Bush-$4.97 million compared with $4.44 million.

So, while the White House spending nearly $5 million in taxpayer dollars for propaganda  seems outrageous on its face, it’s essentially par for the course. Presumably, the increase is a combination of cost-of-living adjustments and a reallocation of staff from other areas to communications. After all, Congress controls presidential spending on staff.

More troubling: Glover notes that the new communications team has managed to bypass the already Obama-friendly press on numerous occasions, including staged “town hall” meetings with preselected guests and even disinviting the press entirely from mundane events like photo-ops with championship sports teams, preferring to produce their own videos for release on the Web.

I don’t like it.  But, again, it’s a natural evolution of the system.  Ronald Reagan’s team was legendary for limiting access to the president and ensuring that their preferred sound byte was pretty much all the press had to report in a given day.  Bill Clinton famously bypassed the more difficult talk shows during the 1992 campaign, instead going on talk radio and late night comedy shows.  George W. Bush and his team gave more time to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other friendly outlets.   Obama is taking that to the next level using social media techniques that PR firms have been advocating for their clients for years.

Again, this is probably not healthy.  The press is an important check on our politicians and, to the extent the politicians can bypass the press to get their message out, we lose that check.  It’s especially problematic at times, like the present, when the White House and Capitol Hill are controlled by the same party.

It’s quite possible, however, that the press will grow tired of being manipulated in this way and go out and do some actual reporting.  Hanging around the press room for scraps isn’t really journalism, after all.

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 or so) before national media picked it up. ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports by their own slogan, didn’t have it. No one did. We were left gasping for more. Is the rumor true? Can anyone confirm? Can police confirm?”

Major media got a little jittery in the past. After 9/11. With other reports that turned into an overcompensation. Fact is, major media can safely report on a rumor as long as it is billed as such. No one has to say that this is confirmed. But people want to know. We get our news on the internet.

We find out about things happening in Iran via Twitter. We find out about Michael Jackson dying… on Twitter. We read blogs that deal with Sarah Palin’s awkwardly bizarre resignation at Alaska governor. We’re not watching your TV stations. We’re not in Nashville. Welcome to the global economy.

Report the damn news and report it as a rumor to hedge your bets. But report the news.

Because I was out and about with the family yesterday, I first saw the news of McNair’s death at YahooNews a half hour or so after it broke nationally and blogged my instant reaction immediately.

I saw reports that Michael Jackson died on Twitter and frantically searched for confirmation.  I did a Breaking News blog post reporting that 1) LA Times had Jackson hospitalized and that 2) several reports that he was dead, all sourced to TMZ, were out.  I updated it shortly thereafter with news that multiple legitimate sources were confirming.

(I saw the reports of Goldblum’s death on Twitter, too, but they were debunked in near-real-time.)

With rare exception, I prefer that the mainstream press report known facts rather than rumors.

People seeing rumors of Jackson’s death on Twitter or TMZ who much cared were presumably searching for confirmation on their own just as I was.  Otherwise, I’m not sure what harm is done to the collective pool of knowledge by having it reported that Jackson was rushed to the hospital — a known fact — and waiting 30 minutes or an hour or so to report that he was dead once that was confirmed.  Conversely, falsely reporting that someone has died has serious consequences.

The McNair story is slowly unfolding as a bizarre soap opera, with alternate reports of murder-suicide and double homicide.  While McNair was undoubtedly an important figure in the world of sports and his murder in the prime of life constitutes breaking news in Nashville and Baltimore (where he played professionally) and for sports pages, I’m not sure what harm there is in taking 30 minutes to gather facts on such a sensitive story.

Indeed, the Goldblum rumor provides a classic cautionary tale.  I for one am rather glad that false reports of Goldblum’s death weren’t flashed on the crawl of every TV show in America.

Like Aaron, I’m a news junkie.  I want my information now.  But unconfirmed rumor is not news; it’s gossip.  If TMZ is wrong about Jackson’s death, nobody will much care; it’s a gossip rag.  If the LAT gets it wrong, though, it loses credibility as a news organization.

There are certainly times when reporting speculation is required.  If, for example, there were reports about an attempt on the life of the president, it’s a national crisis that demands instant reporting.  There were all manner of false reports, for example, when President Reagan was shot, notably the reporting that James Brady had been killed when it turned out he was just horribly wounded.  Similarly, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks demanded 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage and reporting of “facts” as they came in.

Rumors that pop singers and retired athletes have died, however, can go unreported for a few minutes while reporters do some rudimentary fact checking.

Photo by Flickr user Joost Strootman under Creative Commons license.

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 after Google was rebuffed in the effort.  Given Arrington’s strong presence on Twitter, FriendFeed, and other social media networks, I’m guessing that retweets and likes and other passing on of a post with “Google Got Shut Down” in it is causing a mild panic.

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?

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.

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 video of the search history, recorded by Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango. This new video, however (also recorded by Pike), shows the full Google search experience with a very Digg-like interface. Users vote search results up or down – a down vote makes it dissapear with a “poof,” an up vote moves the result to the first page.

I’m not at all sure this is a good idea.  What we’ve seen repeatedly at Digg-type sites is that a handful of users — fewer than 100 early adopter power users — will band together and dominate the voting.  Indeed, as few as 10 users can totally skew the results if they know what they’re doing.  Surely, we don’t want the same thing to happen to search?

Google’s electronic algorithm is too subject to gaming and the splogs are showing up far too much in the results.   But it’s basically an excellent search engine that needs constant tweaking to combat these moves.  Moving in a totally different direction, especially one proven to be even more easily gamed, would be a major blunder.

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. . . .

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, all the evidence shows that people are getting their news increasingly on the Internet, and increasingly engaging with each other online, and that’s where Congress should be.”

Aaron was all over this story on his blog as well as Twitter and FriendFeed.

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, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).

He expounds on this in great detail in an embedded video, using a nifty Australian accent to boot.

I’ve still got a blogroll using blogrolling.com but it’s AJAX’ed so you don’t see the links unless you click for them. But mine, like most still in existence, is a museum, preserving my blog reading habits circa 2005. There are numerous defunct blogs on the list and it really hasn’t been updated at all in two years. Nor do I use it myself, like I once did, as a source for posting materials.

In addition to the causes Duncan suggests, I think it’s mostly a function of the rise of aggregators.  Most of us read blogs through RSS feeds, memeorandum, and even social media sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and FriendFeed.  (The last, incidentally, is how I found this post, via a link shared by K Welch.)

[UPDATE: Eric Berlin suggests an explanation that I overlooked: "The rise of widgets and the greatly increased focus on jamming ads into every nook and cranny likely have had a role in squeezing out blogroll real estate." It's probably at least part of the reason I AJAX'ed mine -- so that I could put it back where readers would see it without sacrificing much sidebar space.]

Do any of you readers actually still use the blogroll?  Is it worth a blogger’s time to update their lists?