Tag Archives: Twitter

Alex Payne & The Very Last Thing He Will Write About Twitter

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Alex Payne on Twitter’s need to decentralize:

Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down.

The entire post, which Alex says are his last words concerning Twitter, is well worth the read.

Function Vs. Form

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Finding happiness in a world teeming with information and products:

Happiness is easier to find when you don’t fill your life with all that clutter and that is the reason I have been thinking about all of this lately. It feels all too daunting to live a life so crammed full with information and constantly changing standards to keep track of. I search for ways to find a balancing point, a calm among the madness of life spinning around me. Its strange to think that the products we create and consume are becoming as much a part of us as the real world experiences they were built to aid us in.

Quote from Function Vs. Form by John Carey.

Leo Laporte – Buzz Kill

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Leo Laporte is back to writing on his blog:

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville.

Via Dave Winer.

I Tweet, Therefore I Am…Seriously?

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The New York Times published “I Tweet, Therefore I Am” today. It is too bad because I though we were past the days of mainstream media feeling to need to publish something, anything about Twitter.

The fun of Twitter and, I suspect, its draw for millions of people, is its infinite potential for connection, as well as its opportunity for self-expression. I enjoy those things myself. But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?

If Twitter causes you to externalize every thought and post every feeling you should step back and take a deep breath. For your followers’ sake, put down the tweet button.

On a separate note, we need to stop absolving responsibility by forming broad claims as questions. If you are going to bring those questions up attempt to answer them. Otherwise you are preying on readers who do not know any better.

Medieval Multitasking and Focus

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A few weeks ago Religion Dispatches published an article about medieval manuscripts and multitasking. The point is that for centuries our minds have referenced texts on multiple levels; the internet did not inherently create this distraction. There is also this gem from a David Brooks column:

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities.

Link wrap-up for #J361

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A collection of links and pointers to what I talked about with Suzi Steffen’s Reporting One class last Thursday.

WordPress

I mentioned a couple of things that may come in handy, including all the support pages for WordPress.com. Those are a great place to find out how specific features work and can help you get going again if you’re stuck on something.

There’s also a handy series of How-To videos at WordPress.tv. These cover everything from the basics to more advanced editing options. There are also a series of videos on the WordPress.tv homepage if you’re interested in watching talks given at WordCamps around the world.

After the Deadline

Great spell, style, and grammar checker that is baked into all WordPress.com blogs. You can also find extensions for Firefox, Google Chrome, and OpenOffice on ATD’s download page.

Podcast recommendations

I mentioned a couple of podcasts and wanted to add some specific recommendations for those interested.

5by5 is a studio run by Dan Benjamin that produces a great series of technology and web-focused podcasts. Many of the guests are not your typical developers as well. Some are in the editing, design, or usability fields as well. The Pipeline is particularly good and the show with Liz Danzico may be interesting to those wanting to improve their writing or find out a bit how professional editors work.

I also highly recommend anything from Merlin Mann. I mentioned his Time & Attention talk in class and that’s really worth watching if you’re wondering the forces that come into play when envisioning how to get people consuming your content.

Danah Boyd is also someone worth following if you’re interested in how information flows around the web. She gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Conference that is about 20 minutes long and well worth listening to.

There was a lot more mentioned too so if you have any questions just shoot me an email. It’s andrewspittle at automattic.com.

Twitter and its plan to run advertising

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I wanted to jot down two quick thoughts about Twitter’s announcement earlier today.

First, the money for Twitter is not going to be in running ads against search terms. I just do not think most people use Twitter as a way to consistently search for information. Google can get away with this because a search engine is not traditionally a personal thing. Google leverages the power of the many, Twitter relies upon relationships between users.

Twitter’s true value in advertising, is going to lie in leveraging what it knows about users you follow. If Hunch is able to build something that predicts tastes based upon following habits Twitter ought to able to develop something similar to deliver targeted recommendations.

This last part is what has me actually excited about advertising on Twitter. This could be huge. It could take the type of recommendation-engine that is true of advertising on The Deck and Fusion Ads and extrapolate it to a service with millions of users.

Archiving Twitter With WordPress

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Yesterday I had a spare couple hours and decided to follow Doug Bowman’s example and set up a self-hosted archive of my Twitter stream with WordPress. You can see the finished product of that here.

There was some interest expressed on Twitter of others wanting to do something similar so I thought I’d help out by making what I did available for download. You can grab a copy of the theme and required plugins which will provide pretty close to a turn key solution for getting this running.

I highly suggest following Bowman’s tutorial for downloading and importing the initial archive of previous tweets. Once you have that done and the plugins and theme are installed there’s a couple things you’ll want to do:

  • Replace the profile_image.jpg file in the theme folder with your own profile image.
  • Head to your profile page within your WordPress installation. You’ll see two new fields, one for the url of your Twitter profile and the other for your Twitter username. These power the text in the header so just fill them both out and the header text will be linked to your profile.
  • The tagline below the username in the header is pulled from your blog’s tagline so fill that out in General tab underneath Settings.
  • Setup Twitter Tools to create a new blog post every time you tweet. You can find more information about doing that at the WordPress plugin directory.
  • Run two queries using the Search Regex plugin (for more info on these queries read the original source). This will link up all the @usernames and #hashtags from your tweets.
    • For @usernames enter /(^|s)@(w+)/ into the Search Pattern field and then enter 1@<a href="http://twitter.com/2">2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.
    • For #hashtags enter /(^|s)#(w+)/ into the Search pattern field and then enter 1#<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%232">2</a> into the Replace pattern field. Check the Regex box.
    • In both cases I suggest running a Replace before running Replace & Save. This will allow you to look everything over before making changes that will affect your database.

That’s it. After doing those steps you should have a searchable, self-hosted archive of everything you’ve posted on Twitter. If you run into questions or problems feel free to fire away in the comments.

Update 3/23: Emily Ingram pointed me to a plugin that will achieve the same auto-linking of @replies and #hashtags that the regex calls do. It’s a super simple solution and can be downloaded from the WordPress directory. Sounds like it works quite well.

Redefining political participation

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The technological capacity of individuals to publish information online expanded tremendously over the last decade. Free platforms for public expression and publication of ideas proliferated, most recently through services like WordPress and Twitter. There are now an incredible variety of tools available to people that allow any individual writer to potentially have global reach.

Many of these tools for publication have an inherently social aspect. More than simply tools for publication and the broadcasting of information they have conversation at the heart of their technology. Communication online necessitates more than just publication. With modern communication tools there as much emphasis is placed upon what happens with the information once put online.

The last few years have seen the astounding expansion of three key technologies: near real-time communication, relatively easy self-publishing, and powerful data aggregation. The rise of Twitter and related technologies of the real-time web, such as the Tornado Web Server, allow for messages to be sent, received, and replied to in mere seconds. Blogging, and self-publishing in general, has developed remarkably powerful tools as well. What started with tools like Blogger and LiveJournal has now exploded with software such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, and Movable Type. Finally, with all of this information being published at a more rapid rate our tools for aggregation have improved immensely. RSS readers such as Google Reader and Fever present the ability to categorize, filter, and rank information from many sources. Furthermore, software developers have begun to leverage algorithms to analyze, sort, and rank news items in a way that allows the software to filter the important items out of the noise.1

The internet and its associated technologies have been around for decades and seen a vast array of literature devoted to their political potential. What is it that makes the current moment different? What about the political potential of these specific technologies lacks precedence? Continue reading →

Participation Through Publication

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As communication online continues to grow we must ensure that there are solid tools providing all with the ability to publish their voice. The ability to make one’s opinions known in a public forum is a requirement of a democratic political system. This right can be traced all the way back to Athenian democracy. Under this system all citizens came together in the Ekklesia to discuss and vote on issues of political importance.1 This can be seen in traditional spaces like town hall meetings, political rallies, and in newspaper editorial sections. The expansion of a desire to make one’s opinions known online signals the most recent manifestation of citizens’ desire to make their thoughts known in a public forum.

The current software available to people wanting to publish online allows for remarkably powerful publishing to occur. Numerous professional-level platforms are offered to any user for free. These tools allow for users to publish their thoughts through free and easy to use software in a public-by-default manner. Furthermore, a growing selection of tools allow for people to publish to a global audience from nearly anywhere. A stationary location with a full-featured computer is increasingly no longer a necessity to partake in online publishing. The ability to publish has been extended to anybody with a mobile phone.

The modern tools that have been developed for publishing online give more people a greater ability to make their voice heard from an expanding range of places. WordPress and Twitter take the ability to publish online and make it something that is accessible to a greater portion of the population. The political potential of the millions of people expressing their voice online can have a tremendous expansionary effect on participation in United States politics. Continue reading →