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Scoble and Twitter in the Borneo Bulletin: the future of news?

Wow - a funny occurence, in light of my growing interest in Twitter of late. I was flipping through the Borneo Bulletin at a cafe in Brunei, and amidst the coverage of the catastrophic earthquake in China, stumbled across coverage of none other than the tech blogosphere’s two darlings: Robert “Andrew” Scoble and Twitter. It looks like a wire excerpt, but still fascinating to see in a tabloid format local Borneo paper…

“Twitters Beat Media in Reporting China Quake (Sanfrancisco, AFP): The world had real-time new about China’s massive earthquake as victim’s dashed out Twitter text messages while it took place, in what was being touted Tuesday as microblogging outshining mainstream news. As the earth shook with tragic consequences, people in parts of China that felt the quake used their mobiles to send terse messages provided by the San Fransisco-based Twitter Inc. News of the deadly catastrophe reached Twitter devotees such as blogger Andrew Scoble in San Francisco even before the massive tremblor, which killed more than 12,000 people in Szechuan province, was reported by news organizations and the earthquake-tracking US Geological Survey. “Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake while it was going on!” Scoble wrote in his popular Scobleizer blog. Twitters are abbreviated text messages that can be instantly posted on online bulletin boards and personal websites and sent to the mobile phones of selected friends.

For me, this post, found in this paper in this place highlights the parallelism rapidly emerging between the blogosphere and mainstream media: for breaking news and on the ground reporting, blogs and micro-blogging services are rapidly becoming the global-standard destination. Connecting web users and mobile users, first world and third, journalism with ad-hoc/off-the-cuff/street-cred reporting, the net is the first place more and more are turning - in the developing world, its setting a precedent that will shape the evolution of nascent news/communications/entertainment industries. The mainstream media is assuming a new shape as well: in depth coverage, background research, and historical context are services that are more easily provided by a news organization…

Anyway, in a nutshell: blogs/microblogging provides instant, unfiltered news; MSM provides a longer term perspective on a given story. Both have a place, neither is mutually exclusive. Its late, I’m tired, I hope this point is coming across - more on this later.

scoble twitter

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Experiments in Corporate Intelligence: SunMeme

Sun Microsystems is if not unique then at least rare in the robustness of its internal blogging community, and the willingness of the corporate legal department to make that community public. Indeed, Sun has almost 5000 publicly readable blogs - from the CEO to the developers in the trenches, from all around the world.

I think its great - I’ve been a long term advocate of internal blogging and the knowledge sharing and growth spurs. There’s more though: a corporate blog community as robust as Sun’s presents a great opportunity for aggregation and memetic analysis: so, I copied and pasted TechWatching onto SunMeme.com and pointed the system to Sun’s blogosphere and let it off its leash.

So far its tracking 683 Sun blogs, of which its actively processing stories from the 182 most active. From what I can tell, it starting to produce some good output - story clusters building around the new UltraSparc processor, for instance, or a NetBeans talk that took place in SecondLife.

There are challenges in tackling the Sun blogosphere too, however; keyword analysis is difficult as some keywords (”java”) are omnipresent, and can’t be used to link together stories. I’m convinced that there’s workarounds though, and the deeper SunMeme gets into the Sun blogosphere, the better the output is looking.

Anyway, enjoy. And if you work at Sun, please feel free to share your thoughts!

memetrackers, sun sunmeme

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Verified by who??! A letter to VISA.

Dear Visa,

Over the last few days I’ve spent many frustrating hours trying to book an AirAsia ticket over an hsdpa connection from a sandy tropical island. Not fun. Once the lethargic AirAsia site actually allowed me to book a ticket, the payment process was interrupted by something called “Verified by Visa” - a mysterious page at “securesite.com” that demanded that I register for the service, re-entering all of my contact info, showing my credit card details, etc. I have a few problems with this:

1. The service died halfway through my “registration” leaving me at a blank screen with nowhere to go. No idea if the transaction went through and whether I had seats booked or not. I ended phoning from the mainland to find out.
2. SecureSite.com?? I don’t know securesite.com from a hole in the ground. From my standpoint, all I’ve done is given yet another third party site all of my credit card details. Oh - I should trust it because there are Visa jpgs all over the place? Perhaps not.
3. I can just imagine the dismal marketing meeting the resulted in the decision to use “securesite.com.”
4. There’s no way to opt out of securesite.com or the Verified by Visa program that I could see.

So, in a nutshell, Visa’s program to make me feel safe (a) killed my transaction, (b) did so in a way that required phone calls to fix, and (c) made me feel less secure by dumping all of my info to yet another site that I don’t trust. Dear Visa: Please shut down the program until its ready for public use.

security visa

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Tweetmeme DOA?

I’m fitting this in while visiting family, so this post is late, and likely short on insight - that being said, after pouring hours and days and weeks of hobby-time in building a relevancy algorithm (see: techwatching) I feel the need to comment on Tweetmeme, which launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Divining interesting-ness from a content pool depends on a number of bits of information that provide relationships between disparate bits, allowing them to be linked together into a topical unit (i.e.: a cluster of stories all discussing a certain topic) that makes sense. Over on TechWatching, I use four things to create topical units (”story clusters”):

1. forward links - the pages that a blog post links to
2. back links - the pages that link to a given page
3. keywords - the meaningful words that posts share - i.e.: proper names like “Google” are counted, conjunctions like “and” are not
4. time - content must have some chronological proximity to be considered “linked” - i.e.: an article about Google from two months ago is less likely to be discussing the topic-du-jour than an article from two hours ago

Now, Techwatching indexes blog posts - which are characterized by all of the above four points - i.e.: blogs are noted for linking, posting quickly (chronological proximity), using relevant keywords and so on. My question about Tweetmeme is whether Twitter provides the same fertile breeding ground of memetic confluence as blogs… Personally, I think its ephermal nature and limited length works against it. Aside from the occaisonal exceptions (Apple events, the socal fires), Twitter seems to be pretty scattershot - and those special situations seem to me to be better served by something more explicit, like hashtags.

techmeme, techwatching, tweetmeme twitter

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Is EveryBlock is going to bump into EveryProblem that BlockRocker did?

Today sees the widely covered launch of EveryBlock - a hyper-local aggregator. Coverage is characterized by words like “redefines” and “slick.”

All of which is great for the people behind Everyblock, and I wish them all the best. For what its worth though, I tried a similar concept a few years ago at BlockRocker.com. The concept was simple: find every localize-able bit of info consistently published on the web, index it, and map it. Blockrocker spat out reviews, real estate listings, pictures, events, and so on, and offered nicely customizeable RSS feeds to boot. I even had a “geotag this page” bookmarklet, tag builders for del.icio.us and blogger to encourage geotagging, and so on.

If you go past BlockRocker today, you’ll find it to be a wasteland, which hasn’t been materially updated in years. I’ve cut it down to blog posts only, and even then, only those that have been explicitly geotagged by their authors. “Why,” you ask?

Because hyperlocal has consistenlty been a technology without a market. Interests are generally not boxed by locale, and localization does not necessarily convey relevance (or traffic). This applies to news stories, photos, and so on. The second part of this rant is that generally people aren’t that interested in local data - for example, TC talks about the power of Everyblock being able to pull up a list of recently cleaned graffitti in Brooklyn. Huh. How many people are going to want to check up on that regularly? Finally: the lack of good meta-data and the overabundance of certain types of listings (events and photos were my biggest problems) meant throwing users repeatedly into a needle a haystack situation.

Anyway, I didn’t intend this to be a negative post, and I really do wish the EveryBlock team good luck. Adrian Holovaty seems well equipped to lead the site to success, and perhaps the time has come for a well-resourced hyperlocal to succeed. I suppose I’m just grumpy about my own inability to execute anything in this space.

blockrocker everyblock

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The Big Digg Disappointment

I long appreciated digg; if not for its content, then for its algorithm’s ability to dynamically sift through the huge volume of submissions and deliver that content. Today we find out digg’s algorithm relies at least in part on human moderation.

What’s the significance (to me)?

1. Digg isn’t an agnostic platform, its as editorial and mod-driven as FARK.
2. Any non-zero amount of moderator activity complete invalidates the democratic elements of the platform.
3. That’s not a bad thing, or wouldn’t be if Digg hadn’t been positioned as agnostic/democratic/algorithmic.
4. Misrepresenting the technology behind one’s site is weak and doesn’t speak well for the digg team’s ability to deliver or for their respect for users.
5. The value of digg’s underlying technology has plummeted.
6. The FARK model works well, and digg has value as a FARK competitor focused on geek news.
7. As TC points out, it makes digg competitors like Reddit a lot more welcoming.

Lord knows I’ve had enough digg-meta news to last a lifetime. Maybe this issue will kick digg off the stage.

digg reddit

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Predictions for 2008, #4: Apple & iTunes Stumbles

Continuing my series of predictions for 2008 (also see number one, and number two, about boingboing and yahoo respectively, and number three about semantic apps): to balance out Yahoo’s prophesized resurgence, someone must fall - and I think Apple’s due.

Actually, this is two predictions in one: firstly, DRM will continue to wither, and the sale of naked MP3’s will continue to take off. From this follows my second prediction - that iTMS (iTunes Music Store) will stumble in sales growth numbers as the DRM-less revolution Apple kicked off allows competitors to sell into the iPod ecosystem for the first time.

The end of DRM’d music is a great boon for consumers, who now have legal options for high-quality, downloadable music that plays anywhere. Indeed, the downloadable music sector as a whole will continue grow (and CD’s will continue to gather dust on store shelves), but I’ll bet that Apple’s iTMS growth will underperform the industry - i.e.: new competitors like Amazon will get get a non-zero slice of marketshare for the first time.

That’s how I know Apple really loves consumers: they’re willing to break down their own ludicrously profitable walls for the betterment of the overall consumer experience. (see: Steve’s open letter)

2008, apple, drm predictions

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Predictions for 2008, #3: Semantic apps will continue to suck

Well, “suck” is probably too strong a work. How about “Semantic apps will continue to be completely irrelevant?”

2007 was a year heavy on buzz around so-called next generation, 3.0, semantic apps - things like PowerSet & Hakia (natural language search), Spock (people search), Twine (who knows), and so on.

Well, after a year of anticipation, each is either unlaunched (powerset), unloved (spock is weak), or unheard of (twine).

Consider the value propositions:

1. Spock promised powerful people search, and so far has delivered a (drum roll)… social network scraper. See “idiocy writ large” for reference.
2. Next gen search engines promised better results than google and so far have delivered… junk. See my off the cuff Hakia vs. Google comparo for reference.
3. Apps like Twine promise to automate the discovery of relationships between your disparate bits of information - but if you listen to the video there’s a lot of buzzwords (semantic graph! open! graph! wikis! ontologies!) and little substance (its got smarts!) beyond keyword parsing.

…so my prediction is that Google will continue to kick ass, the so-called next-gen startups will continue to languish or sit or beta-purgatory, and slowly the concept of “semantic” will fade from the public eye as VC’s find something else to latch onto.

(Quick update: Twine has also committed what I consider to be the cardinal sin of marketing plans - attempting to create their own vernacular, i.e.: in scoble’s video above one “twines” a link, and creates a “twine” about something - arggh. Its as bad as the now defunct Teqlo)

2008, google, hakia, powerset, predictions, semantic, spock, twine web3.0

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Australia Censoring the Internet: mortgaging a nation’s future

At heart, I’m a libertarian: I am firm in my belief that the ills that accompany unfettered access to self-expression and communication are outweighed by the benefits - that the abdication of personal responsibility that seems endemic in our society is a call to community action and education - not an invitation to governments to censor and regulate.

Sadly, those of similar mind are under constant attack; for example, Australia has announced that default censorship of the Internet is coming. At issue are the children who’s parents are no longer deemed capable of seeing to their memetic welfare; instead, the entire nation must bear the cost for their inattention.

As often happens, it seems the Australian government has seized upon a media-manufactured social ill as an excuse to strengthen its powers. The TechCrunch post linked-to above suggests scary motives afoot - that broad filtering is a prelude to future crackdowns against bloggers, policy criticism, and free speech. While that may one day be the case, such conspiracy theories give governments too much credit for forethought. Apply Occam’s razor, and you get a much more utilitarian explanation: like most populations, governments expand when and where they can - purely by virtue of existing. An educated, activist citizenry is tasked with playing the role of antibody and containing their legislative spread. Witness the recent Canadian reaction to music industry sponsored legislation.

Where then are the Australians?

The Australian government has lulled its population by coating its plan in a beguiling, saccharine layer of moral virtue - after all, who doesn’t want to protect the children? (Parents, evidently.) And, criticism has been headed off with an exit clause: those not wishing to see the government’s interpretation of the world may be able to opt-out of the censored view, though the monetary and social cost of that choice are unknown. Wrapping an indecent proposal in a layer of barely acceptable plausibility: a method for selling used cars, not national leadership.

And so continues the slow slide into nanny state societies and the stunning willingness to trade freedom for security (or corporate profit) that has characterized the first decade of the new millennium. Parents are saved from taking responsibility for their children by a government willing to mortgage its citizen’s future.

australia censorship

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Safeway has good, free Wifi

Safeway (the grocery store) features both Starbucks outlets and free, anonymous log-in WiFi access (in Canada/Manitoba/Winnipeg at least). I don’t know what Starbuck’s wireless rates are like in the US, but here they’re exorbitant ($9/hr, etc.) - so if you hang out at the grocery store instead, you can sip the same coffee, nibble the same snacks, and surf for free. I tried it out today, and it was fast and as free as promised. I was only there for about 20 minutes, but there’s no stated maximum time policies or whatnot, and my location had plenty of electrical outlets about.

safeway, wifi wireless

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