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Where’s Twitter’s past, and what’s it’s future?

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Blogs privilege the “now.” New stuff always goes on top. But they also create a durable record of “then” — as I have learned in spending the last couple of years digging through the back catalog of blogging. One of the great contributions of blogging software is to organize the past for anyone who writes frequently online. Before blogs, with each new addition to a website we had to think, where does this go, and how will I find it later? Blog tools, as personal content management systems, ended that era.

Twitter is great at “now.” But as far as I can tell, it’s lousy at “then.” It offers no interface to the past. You can’t easily navigate your way backwards in time.

Recently, I wanted to figure out the date of my first tweet. It’s still there in the database. But there’s no simple way to locate it. (Folks on Twitter pointed me to services like mytweet16 that dig up your oldest tweets, or tweetbook.in, which puts your whole Twitter history into a PDF, so there’s a way to do it, but not much of a useful interface.)

Each tweet is timestamped and lives at a unique URL. So it should be possible to build the machinery to organize one’s tweets into a more coherent record. (Dave Winer has written about this and done some work to store his Twitter past.) But — again, as far as I’ve been able to determine — we don’t really have a clear sense, or commitment from Twitter the company, of how long these URLs are going to be around.

The other big weakness of Twitter as a sort of universal microblogging platform is that all its interaction is happening on one company’s server, in that company’s database. That poses some fierce technical problems if the Twitterverse keeps scaling up. (See for instance this comment by Chuck Shotton at Scripting News: “IMO, Twitter is a toy to be experimented with until it breaks and is replaced by a properly implemented solution that will persist, scale, and be as open as the protocols above.”)

If Twitter can engineer its way out of the scaling dilemma, we’re still looking at a platform that is owned by one company. One of Dave Winer’s original message as a proto-blogger in the mid-90s was to warn us about such platform ownership and to celebrate the arrival of the Web as the platform that nobody owns. Today Winer is sounding the same alarms about Twitter, and they are worth weighing. While I find Twitter far more open to the Web than, say, Facebook — which really feels like an AOL-style walled garden — it’s still just one company, with one “namespace,” or set of unique names for people to claim (good Twitter IDs will probably run out even faster than domain names).

To date I think Twitter has done a pretty fine job of serving its platform and its users — though I have qualms, as many do, about the way its Suggested User List mixes up editorial and business roles without taking full responsibility for either. But once the company decides it’s time to “monetize” — whether that happens next month or year or decade, and whether it’s handled sensitively or crudely — we are likely to see old-fashioned conflicts between serving users and serving the quarterly revenue targets re-emerge.

Best case: Twitter hits a home-run by finding an innovation that, like Google’s targeted text ads, brings in revenue without degrading the primary service. (There is a subtle argument — espoused by Rich Skrenta and others — that Google, in monetizing its pages, corrupted the link-ranking on which its whole search engine depends. But for most of us, Google managed to make a fortune without noticeably reducing its usefulness — a neat feat.) Worst case: Twitter fails to figure out a business model and its investors grow impatient, forcing the service to overload us with advertising like a tanking dotcom in 2001.

On his blog at BNET, David Weir recently recorded the following comment from an anonymous Silicon Valley insider: “Twitter is exactly what the Internet was around 1996. It represents nothing less than the New Internet. It is the game-changer.”

I share the general enthusiasm for Twitter as a model for real-time interaction. But I don’t fully buy the “New Internet” notion. By 1996, people like me (and David Weir, and Evan Williams, and Dave Winer, and countless others) had flocked to the Internet because it was wide open. In the World of Ends formulation, “No one owns it. Everyone can use it. Anyone can improve it.” Twitter, exciting as it is, falls far short of that kind of game-changing.

[This post follows on from yesterday’s How Twitter Makes Blogs Smarter.]

How Twitter makes blogs smarter

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Probably the single question I’m most often asked as I talk to people about Say Everything is: How has Twitter changed blogging? Twitter’s rapid growth — along with the preference of some users for sharing on Facebook and the rise of all sorts of other “microblogging” tools, from Tumblr and Posterous to Friendfeed and identi.ca — is altering the landscape. But I think the result is auspicious in the long run, both for Twitter-style communication and for good old traditional blogging. Here’s why.

If you look back to the roots of blogging you find that there has always been a divide between two styles: One is what I’ll call “substantial blogging” — posting longer thoughts, ideas, stories, in texts of at least a few paragraphs; the other is “Twitter-style” — briefer, blurtier posts, typically providing either what we now call “status updates” or recommended links. Some bloggers have always stuck to one form or another: Glenn Reynolds is the classic one-line blogger; Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen are both essay-writers par excellence. Other bloggers have struggled to balance their dedication to both styles: Just look at how Jason Kottke has, over the years, fiddled with how to present his longer posts and his linkblog: Together in parallel, interspersed in one stream, or on separate pages?

A historical footnote: Twitter’s CEO is Evan Williams, who was previously best known as the father of Blogger. You find a style of blogging that’s remarkably Twitter-like on the blogs that became the prototype for Blogger — a private weblog called “stuff” that was shared by Williams and Meg Hourihan at their company, Pyra, and a public blog of Pyra news called Pyralerts (here’s a random page from July 1999). The same style later showed up in many early Blogger blogs: brief posts, no headlines, lots of links — it’s all very familiar. In some ways, with Twitter, Williams has just reinvented the kind of blogging he was doing a decade ago.

Today, the single-line post and the linkblog aren’t dead, but certainly, much of the energy of the people who like to post that way is now going into Twitter. It’s convenient, it’s fun, it has the energy of a shiny novelty, and it has the allure of a social platform.

But there’s a nearly infinite universe of things you might wish to express that simply can’t fit into 140 characters. It’s not that the Twitter form forces triviality upon us; it’s possible to be creative and expressive within Twitter’s narrow constraints. But the form is by definition limited. Haiku is a wonderful poetic form, but most of us wouldn’t choose to adopt it for all of our verse.

From their earliest days, blogs were dismissed as a mundane form in which people told us, pointlessly, what they had for lunch. In fact, of course, as I reported in Say Everything‘s first chapter, the impulse to tell the world what you had for lunch appears to predate blogging, stretching back into the primordial ooze of early Web publishing.

Today, at any rate, those who wish to share quotidian updates have a more efficient channel with which to share them. This clarifies the place of blogs as repositories for our bigger thoughts and ideas and for more lasting records of our own experiences and observations.

There are a couple of serious limitations to Twitter as a blog substitute, beyond the character limit. But this post has gotten long — even for a post-Twitter blog! — so I’m going to address them in my next post, tomorrow.

Nikki Finke, David Carr, invisible rewrites and the Web’s original premise

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David Carr’s profile of Hollywood gossip blogger Nikki Finke contained two statements that I thought shouldn’t stand without challenge.

She isn’t always right and, as her critics have pointed out, she’s not above using the new-media prerogative of going into her archives and changing the bad call to a good one…

[Patrick Goldstein] hastens to add that Ms. Finke has gone into her own archive to correct errors. Bill Wyman, who blogs at Hitsville.org, documented an instance in which she altered a previous post about a director getting a job, then took credit for a scoop when it turned out to be somebody else.

Ms. Finke said both men were wrong on the specifics and each had a personal vendetta against her, a frequent theme whenever criticism of her work came up. She does say that she considers Web articles to be living things, reflecting “the latest information I have received.”

Yes, Web articles are “living things,” and they can and often are updated and fixed. But no responsible Web journalist makes substantive changes in copy after the fact without leaving a record — a strikeout, a note in the text indicating a change or update was made, or something like that. No one who self-identifies as an online journalist claims the right to make such invisible rewrites as a “new media prerogative.”

To admirers and detractors, she is the perfect expression of the Web’s original premise, which suggested that a lone obsessive could own the conversation.

The “Web’s original premise” was that if you created a simple standard for linked hypertext documents, people and institutions would add content and build a global repository of information. Tim Berners-Lee had no particular interest, as far as I know in empowering “lone obsessives” or helping anyone “own” the “conversation.”

From book cover to pillowcase

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Designing a good book cover is not easy. I was very pleased with the arresting one we came up with for Say Everything. It takes off from the popular icon for subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed, but turns it into something more evocative of a person’s voice sent out into the ether.

And then there’s that little guy pushing a ball, suggestive of the effort and persistence involved in creating a good blog. It also made me think of the myth of Sisyphus, a central image in my first book, Dreaming in Code.

So I was tickled when I received this “RSS pillow” as a gift recently:

RSS Pillow

The pillow is available from a seller on Etsy who’s got a variety of other “geeky pillows” on offer. It’s not exactly a Say Everything tchotchke but it’ll do! Since I’ve been waking up before 6 AM every day this week to do early-morning radio interviews about the book I am finding the sight of this pillow especially seductive.

Newsies beat bloggers? Some caveats on memetracker study

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news-cycle-image2

A new study examines the interplay of mainstream news outlets and blogs in forming the news cycle. One of its findings is that, as a report by Steve Lohr in today’s Times puts it, “For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours.”

This story won’t buck that trend. Lohr’s piece was posted online last night and my post here follows by about 10 hours or so. One reason for this is that I slept through the night. Another is that I decided to actually read the study before posting.

The study — Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle, by Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstron and Jon Kleinberg — is fascinating work; though I’m not qualified to assess its math, I found it careful and thoughtful in its approach to the subject. But before its core finding coalesces into a hardened soundbite — “pros beat bloggers by 2.5 hours!” — I want to offer some cautions and raise some red flags.

The most important caveat is that the study isn’t really tracking “news.” It looks at the propagation of specific quotations in news and blog coverage of the final three months of the 2008 election cycle. In other words, it’s tracking soundbite phrases — like “lipstick on a pig” and “palling around with terrorists.”

Such phrases are sometimes proxies for real news but most often they’re just part of the partisan slagfest. The memetracker study emphasizes the trivial at the expense of the substantive. In its world, if there’s no brief quotation that sums up a particular story, the story doesn’t exist.

Last fall, surely, the biggest story of all was the near-collapse of our financial system. In the study, this story is represented by a few phrases like “our entire economy is in danger” and “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” While these phrases are reasonable ways to track the language the candidates used to discuss the crisis, they don’t provide any hooks for understanding the extraordinary outpouring of explanation and analysis of an extremely complex story in both the mainstream media and the econo-blogosphere.

The researchers find that the news cycle is governed by two factors: “imitation” and “recency.” In other words, phrases rise in prominence because media and blogs copy one another, and fall as individual phrases age. This is a useful model, but it leaves no room for valuing originality in coverage. (No surprise, since it’s looking exclusively at quotations.) Both traditional news organizations and bloggers place great value on getting a story that no one else has, or expressing a point of view that can’t be found anywhere else. Most of us — bloggers and pro journalists alike — assume that originality drives attention. But the memetracking research is biased against originality, and it simply excludes material that doesn’t hang off the soundbite quotes of public figures, so it offers no help assessing whether we’re right in that assumption.

One of the central argument of my book Say Everything is that blogs have enhanced our culture by extending the width and depth of public dialogue. But the memetracker researchers’ focus on quoted phrases excludes such contributions.

As for that 2.5-hour lag: since the study focuses on quotations as a sort of genetic marker for ongoing news threads in election coverage, of course the traditional media are going to have the jump on bloggers. They’re following the politicians around with microphones and notebooks. The study did find that, 3.5 percent of the time, phrases are injected into the news cycle first by blogs and then picked up by traditional news outlets. It’s certainly possible that this pattern would be found to apply outside of election news, and with a wider set of stories than those defined by political quotations. But we don’t know that.

Another limitation of the study: It misses the interplay between both traditional media and blogs on the one hand, and the two other vast channels through which soundbites propagate, cable news outlets and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Finally, the study relies on Google News to draw a boundary between the news media and blogs. A site that appears in Google News is considered media; everything else is a blog. While this approach is convenient, it ends up slicing off some of the top layer of the blogosphere in arbitrary ways: for instance, Gawker and Daily Kos end up as “media” rather than blogs, but Talking Points Memo is a blog.

I think the study’s authors are being careful about not overreaching in their claims for their research. Kleinberg tells Lohr: “You can see this kind of research as further elevating the role of sound bites… But what we’re doing is more using them as the approximation for ideas and story lines… We don’t view quotes as the most important object, but algorithms can capture quotes.”

Nonetheless, I fully expect to see it taken as conventional wisdom from this point forward that “news starts with the traditional media and then moves into the blogosphere.” Perhaps the Memetracker folks can follow the phrase “2.5 hours” and show us exactly how that happens.

[You can find neat visualizations of the data from the study at a companion site, memetracker.org, from which I inserted the image at the top of this post.]

BONUS LINK: Chris Anderson outlines his research into the news cycle. Anderson took one story, followed it through the maze of coverage online and in print. It’s what he calls a “qualitative” approach to complement the Memetracker study’s quantitative work.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I wrote above that Talking Points Memo would be considered a blog by the study because I couldn’t find any posts from it on Google News, but Zach Seward at Nieman Lab did (here). I’m further confused by the study’s description of the list of “early reporters” of many stories as being “blogs and independent media sites” including HotAir.com and Talking Points. This whole business of dividing the world between blogs and traditional media is, as Mark Glaser argues in the comments to Seward’s piece, increasingly difficult to pursue or defend.

“Images are not a representation of reality”

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Last Sunday the NY Times mag ran a photo feature on abandoned, half-built real estate projects — casualties of the big bust. The pictures were stunningly otherwordly — eerily lit, human-free canvases of financial devastation. Dayna, my wife, handed me the magazine and asked, “Are these computer generated?” They had, she added, an uncanny-valleyish feel.

The feature noted that photographer Edgar Martins “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.” Now it turns out the Times has removed the photos from its website and posted an embarrassing editor’s note admitting that the photos had been “digitally manipulated: “Most of the images,” the editors wanly declare, “did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show.” It seems that, in some sort of misguided effort to create more pleasing images, Martins duplicated and then flipped portions of some photos to create a barely perceptible mirror image: a sort of fearful — but now, we know, bogus — symmetry.

As I read up on the controversy (here’s the original conversation on Metafilter that exposed the matter, here’s Simon Owens’ account of how that happened, and here’s some photographic detail) I had two thoughts: One, sounds like this photographer didn’t come clean to his editors, and that’s unprofessional and probably unforgivable. But, two: the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show? Huh? Does any image? Can any image? Or article, or representation of any sort?

Before I get any more Borgesian on you, let me point you back to the interviews I did with the photographer and multimedia artist Pedro Meyer back in the early 90s — one from the San Francisco Examiner, and one from Wired. (Please note that the Wired piece got mangled somewhere between the magazine and the Web; the intro paragraph appears at the end.)

This, from the Examiner piece:

Pedro Meyer points to one of his photographs and says, “Tell me what’s been altered in this picture.”

The photo shows a huge wooden chair on a pedestal – a Brobdingnagian seat that looms over the buildings in the background with the displaced mystery of an Easter Island sculpture.

It’s difficult to say what’s going on here: A trompe l’oeil perspective trick? Or the product of digital special effects?

Meyer is a serious artist and philosopher of technology, but today he’s playing a little game of “what’s wrong with this picture?”… The truth about the chair photo is that it’s a “straight” image: It’s just a really big chair.

Meyer says he took the shot outside an old furniture factory in Washington, D.C. But the self-evidently transformed pictures that surround it in his exhibit – like that of a pint-sized old woman on a checkerboard table carrying a torch toward an angelic girl many times her size – call its accuracy into question. We stare and distrust our eyes.

So is Pedro Meyer, who started out as a traditional documentary photographer, out to subvert our faith in the photographic image, our notion that “pictures never lie”? You better believe it.

“I think it’s very important for people to realize that images are not a representation of reality,” Meyer says. “The sooner that myth is destroyed and buried, the better for society all around.”

[You can see that chair photo in the “Truths and Fictions” gallery available off this page — click through to screen 26.]

And this, from the Wired interview:

I’m not suggesting that a photograph cannot be trustworthy. But it isn’t trustworthy simply because it’s a picture. It is trustworthy if someone we trust made it.

You’re interviewing me right now, you’re taking notes and taping the conversation, and at the end you will sit down and edit. You won’t be able to put in everything we talked about: you’ll highlight some things over others. Somebody reading your piece in a critical sense will understand that your value judgments shape it. That’s perfectly legitimate. Turn it around: let me take a portrait of you, and suddenly people say, That’s the way he was.

We don’t trust words because they’re words, but we trust pictures because they’re pictures. That’s crazy. It’s our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution.

After learning what Meyer was trying to teach me, I can’t get too huffy about Martins’ work. There is no sharp easy line between photos that are “manipulated” and those that aren’t; there is a spectrum of practice, and when a photo is cropped or artificially lit or color-adjusted or sharpened or filtered in any way it is already being manipulated, even if Photoshop is never employed. Martins’ pictures are beautiful and arresting, and if he’d simply told the world what he was up to, I don’t think anyone would be too upset.

Of course, if Martins had been forthright the Times would probably not have printed his work, because it has an institutional commitment to, I guess, attempt to “wholly reflect” reality. Somehow.

I don’t demand that of photographers or journalists or newspapers. I just ask them to tell me what they’re up to. As David Weinberger put it at the Personal Democracy Forum: “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Why people blog — and why journalists keep missing the point

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There is a shortsighted misunderstanding of the motivation of most bloggers that I keep encountering as I’m out there talking about Say Everything. The people asking me questions are naturally, for the most part, journalists; and as I write in the book, journalists as a class have a particularly hard time understanding why most people blog.

This jumped out at me as I read this passage in today’s Wall Street Journal review of Chris Anderson’s “Free,” which was written by Jeremy Philips, who is executive vice president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the Journal along with vast tracts of the media landscape:

If you have a blog, “no matter how popular,” the revenue from AdSense — a Google service that places ads on Web sites — will probably never “pay you even minimum wage for the time you spend writing it.” Of course, that’s fine for bloggers more interested in fame or influence than in money or for blogs (like Mr. Anderson’s own) that are loss leaders for more lucrative endeavors, such as writing books or making speeches. But if you have to earn a living from the Web, “free” can be a problem.

Note the alternatives Philips offers: You might blog for money. You might blog for fame or influence or as a “loss leader” for your real business. But nowhere in his world is there room for the actual motivation that drives most bloggers: a desire to express themselves, to think out loud, to exult in the possibilities of writing in public — and learn from the pitfalls, too. Maybe there’s a payoff in enhancing your reputation, but there can also be a payoff in simply enhancing your experience at communicating your thoughts and ideas. Speaking to a big crowd is alluring but speaking even to a small group of friends is rewarding, too. For the great majority of participants, blogging is a social activity, not an aspiration to mass-media stardom.

It is very hard for journalists to understand this because the opportunity to express themselves in public has always been a part of their professional birthright. So they won’t notice that motivation even when it’s staring them in the face. When you point this out, you are almost always greeted with a sort of cynical sniff: You can’t be serious. But I am!

Linked endnotes for Say Everything

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Now live on the Say Everything website: The book’s entire set of endnotes, all properly linked to their mostly URL-based sources.

When I started writing for the Web in 1994 I quickly understood that the ability to link directly to sources was a godsend for demonstrating the quality of your work. So when I returned to print to write Dreaming in Code, I was a little frustrated: endnotes are a valuable tradition, but when the bulk of the sources are on the Web, you wind up with a bunch of lengthy URL codes sitting there dead on the paper. So with that book I duplicated the endnotes on the book’s site. And I’ve now done that again.

I hope this will help those readers of the book who want to dig deeper into the source material. It will also give anyone who is on the fence about whether they’re interested in the book’s topics another way to explore its contents before buying.

Say Everything appearances and events

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Today Say Everything is officially on sale, available from your favorite bookseller.

Here’s some quick info about upcoming appearances in the Bay Area:

On July 16, at 7 p.m., I’ll be speaking at Books Inc., the Opera Plaza bookstore in downtown San Francisco.

On July 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, I’ll be speaking at an event cosponsored by Berkeley Arts and Letters and the Berkeley CyberSalon. ($10, $5 students, members, at Brown Paper Tickets or the door if available.)

On Aug. 3, at 7 p.m., I’ll be presenting at Book Passage, Corte Madera, part of the Left Coast Writer’s Salon.

Also, I will be appearing in mediated form:

On July 16, at 7:30 a.m., on the KPFA Morning Show.

Say Everything comes to Second Life on Sunday, July 12, on Mitch Wagner’s Copper Robot show.

It’ll be great to see you at any of these!

Two additional entrypoints to the story of blogging

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When I set out to chronicle the rise of blogging in book form, I knew there was no way my work could hope to be comprehensive. This story simply has too many strands and facets. The ones I chose to focus on are, I believe, among the most significant. But there are many other legitimate and valuable ways to approach the subject. Here are two examples.

(1) A couple days ago I finished reading Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press. Eric and I were colleagues at Salon for years, but I hadn’t known that he was working on this subject as I worked on Say Everything. When I ordered the book I worried a bit, as authors will, that there might be a lot of overlap between Boehlert’s account of the rise of the political blogosphere and my own.

It turns out the books are highly complementary. Say Everything uses the story of Josh Marshall’s evolution as a blogger-journalist as a thread to follow the larger tale of the rise of the political blogosphere, as blogging leaped from the tech world to the political realm in the aftermath of 9/11. Bloggers on the Bus is more of a group biography of the progressive blogging universe, concentrating on its role in the 2008 election cycle.

Boehlert’s book is full of vivid anecdotes and thoroughly reported portraits of bloggers on the left. I recommend it for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how blogging and new-media organizing set the stage for Obama’s victory — as well as for readers of Say Everything who want a more detailed account of the people and events that shaped today’s blue-state blogging world.

(2) On Friday, thanks to Dave Winer’s post and tweet about it, I came across a new paper by Rudolf Ammann, a scholar in London who is studying the roots of blogging. Its title is “Jorn Barger, the NewsPage Network, and the Emergence of the Weblog Community,” and it’s an unusually thorough and careful attempt to exhume the details of the process by which the pre-Blogger-era blogosphere (circa first half of 1999) emerged from one of its roots– the users of Dave Winer’s NewsPage Suite software beginning in 1997. Ammann’s thesis is that the NewsPage users never really coalesced into a community until Jorn Barger, of Robot Wisdom WebLog fame, set out to organize them as such.

As befits a work of scholarship as opposed to popular journalism, Ammann’s paper pursues this subject far deeper into the weeds than I do in Say Everything. Where I focused my effort to understand Barger by reading his writing on artificial intelligence, Ammann spent his time digging into the Usenet archive of the alt.hypertext group, and came up with some good stuff.

I have a number of thoughts and comments on the paper that I’m going to reserve till I’ve had a chance to reread it carefully. But my initial take is that, as with Bloggers on the Bus, it provides a valuable complement to my book — filling in some details I left out and offering an alternative angle on some tales I did cover.

The history of blogging turns out to be an even bigger subject than I expected. It’s good to have company here!