When Betaworks’ John Borthwick mentioned on the latest Gillmor Gang an analysis of the speculation surrounding Obama’s Bin Laden takeout announcement before the late night speech last Sunday, I had to look it up.
Check it out. There’s an underlying pitch in it for SocialFlow, a Betaworks company, but that is OK with me since it is a subtle pitch and it tells a tale you won’t hear elsewhere about social media reputation and how news takes shape online. It swirls around in little eddies that gather force and sometimes whoosh into the Main Stream.
Crazy how important Twitter has become in the news system, isn’t it?
It is becoming important for everything, not just news, though some voices are still absent. Funny, I will rail all day against curmudgeons who diss Twitter, but I’ll make a confession: I am glad I don’t see David Simon pimping each episode of his show in my stream. But maybe he would not use Twitter in that way; I’d like to think so.
What does my pleasure in Simon’s abstinence say about Twitter? Maybe that even people like me, a four-year user of the service, still find it vaguely trivial on the whole, increasingly promotional, self-centered. Yeah, it’s pretty much a mirror of the culture, and I suppose that is its value.
This cracks me up: the German press is having it out with the government’s press office because a spokesperson announced Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the U.S. on Twitter before it was announced to the press in a traditional news conference.
It’s a little hard to tell from the translation but some members of the media seem pretty pissy about it. The communications guy holding the press conference isn’t having any of it. I wonder if there’s video. I’d like to hear the tone and see the body language in that exchange.
I heard about it in a retweet of Jay Rosen by Dave Winer so I’m hoping they will talk about it on today’s Rebooting the News podcast.
Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.
It all came full circle in little neural connections this morning when seeing Dave’s twitter handle fired off a reminder of the podcast, and the circle was cemented by the irony that that other reformation began in Germany.
OK, not as simple as the simplest FB plugins; you need an application ID.
I’m just adding the embed code to a single post, not integrating it into my CMS. Which is kind of interesting. You could use it on an ad hoc basis.
Will it improve civility on sites that use it? I think so. Over on Techcrunch, commenters are complaining they don’t like the fact that they see their Facebook circle as their personal social space, and comments on technology articles have no place there. I see that, and also see that it’s not just real names that will promote civility; you don’t want people you know in real life to perceive you as the negative asshole you are when you blurt out drive-by comments on blogs.
Ever since Egypt’s President Mubarak disabled the country’s internet on Thursday, net buzz about a U.S. “internet kill switch” bill has revived. The “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” was introduced last summer by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins and would give the president the power to turn off critical systems in the event of a cyber attack on the U.S.
Like a lot of citizens I’ve had bi-partisanship and harmony in political discourse on my mind lately, so I took a browse around a couple of right-wing haunts this morning. I thought this surely must be one of those occasions when the political spectrum might bend itself into a cylinder and left and right libertarians could connect. I did see a little of what I wanted to see: comments like, “Well, for once I agree with the ACLU.” The American Civil Liberties Union and 23 other groups came out against the scheme in June. (Letter, .pdf file)
More frequent were remarks that dig in on the left-right stand-off. On Free Republic a commenter mentions that Susan Collins is a “full fledged socialist/marxist that sides with the enemy every time.” The crowd over there often seems to get more steamed up about RINOs than it does about Democrats.
Freepers in the thread are also kicking around the idea of getting into ham radio, which fits with the apocalyptic survivalist rhetoric about food stores, ammo hoarding and gold that you see in certain circles. Am I imagining things or is there often a hopeful, wistful tinge to worries about mass deprivation? If there is, I think I understand it a little; one of my kids loves post-apok fiction and movies, maybe as part of a yearning for a simpler world.
At Glenn Beck’s The Blaze site, the talk is scarier. I made a screen cap of this comment because you’d think it might come down once moderators show up for work.
Please remember a very basic truth, and utter constant in this world: “If you shoot a FEMA NAZI in the right place, with a U.S. Caliber .30 Bullet, that NAZI will fall over dead and won’t give you anymore trouble.”
WHEN, the FED-NAZIS do finally get their marching orders, they will face no less than 30 million rifles pointed at them from behind every blade of grass in this country. The “High Entertainment” will commence the very nano second that this Communist Monkey in the White House, or any other, shuts down the Internet, or makes any one of several other “Trigger” moves.
Blaze commenters are not quite sure what to make of making common cause with the ACLU. One comes right out and states that if the ACLU is against the bill, he is for it, while another is more open-minded, stating that if the ACLU is against it, he’s really against it.
On both sites, any accord between the liberty fighters and the liberties union is grudging. A freeper says the ACLU might be right but he feels sure it is unintentional! A Blaze commenter remarks that a broken clock is right twice a day.
Oh well.
(By the way, I never buy that argument that you can’t judge an issue by blog comments. Sure, you can’t hold a blogger responsible for the opinions of her commenters, but I think a scan of comments to gauge the sense of a sub-culture is every bit as legit as polling or focus groups and more scientific than “man on the street” interviews. Why else would Karl Rove follow so many people on Twitter. You gotta think he’s crunching that data somehow—and that social media sentiment analysis will play a big part in the 2012 presidential elections.
Update: In fact, the coming deluge of election coverage by blogs, reported yesterday in the NYTimes media section, could benefit from a smart analysis of net sentiment. Tech types could invent a whole new category of insight measurement to complete with old-fashioned polling. Product marketers already have a start on this. Instead, the political blog focus will be the horserace. “Great!” tweeted NYU J-school Prof Jay Rosen. (It was meant ironically.) It’s an opportunity for a web programmer/journalism partnership like Jay and Dave Winer talk about on their Rebooting the News podcast. You’d need a gifted web database type—somebody who can make APIs stand on their heads and who can fashion out-of-the-box queries to put Twitter’s simple smiley or frowny attitude switches to shame.)
You know how blogs, news sites and entertainment sites put “Sarah Palin” in a headline (which often also puts the words in the URL) to rack up page views? Liberal, conservative, small blogs, big media—it works for everybody for different reasons.
Well, there’s a fair chance I am completely full of shit, but I think the TLC Channel’s new supplemental site for the Sarah Palin’s Alaska show is purposely courting controversy. The site provides four blogs and a podcast to serve as a newer-media add-on to the traditional network show site. One of the blogs, called Not Taking Sides is the place to talk about politics, because, even though the TV series is non-political, politics are going to come into it, the inaugural post sort of explains.
It makes sense for TLC to do this from a marketing perspective. It’s true that the show is going to be political no matter how it’s positioned so why shouldn’t the very entity that’s creating the buzz get in on some of the discussion action? Negative comments about Palin are not scrubbed, and call me cynical, but some of them almost look like seed comments—they’re too well punctuated and use proper capitalization rules.
Head blogger for the politics section will be Matt Gagnon, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He’s busy working on a recount, they don’t say whose—maybe Joe Miller’s? So he will show up later.
It’s a funny old world out there in new media land, when commercial interests get in the game and the genuine might be genuine, or it might be a hustle, or might be a little of both.
You have to wonder, though, if Sarah is down with stirring the pot. Admitting there is a political angle runs counter to every description she has applied to the show. She might be OK with it, since the environment is somewhat controlled.
Of course I like the new PBS iPad app. I like all of that socialist media stuff. My car radio dial doesn’t know there is a station other than WBEZ until my younger kid comes home from school and compulsively hits the scan button to drink in the nicheyness of the Chicago music radio market compared to the less specific range of options in his college town.
But about the app. The rage on the right to defund public media suggests that PBS/NPR fans are a sub-culture (that must be thwarted). We may be a “type,” it’s true, but it’s a loose type, and I think the ideal would be a collection of PBS iPad apps carving out more specific niches. Why not make several apps for different communities of interest and bake social media features right into them? I think they could be supported, just as larger radio markets can support more narrowly programed stations.
I might like PBS but I love literary adaptations. An app devoted to Masterpiece classics could allow users to watch the latest productions and talk about them with each other. (Would they be into talking? Oh yes, yes they would.) I may not care much about migration patterns of bison, but fans of Nature would love an app just for them, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if contributions would flow in, just because people appreciate it when they have been given a space that celebrates their passions and interests and provides an opportunity to revel in their obsessions in the company of like minds. Engagement follows when it’s all about the affinity group in relation to the provider of the media—not just about the provider.
In fact, I really believe that sometime in the not-too-distant future, the “Here is all our stuff” approach will come to be perceived as an egocentric stance. TV “channels” won’t be established by their creators; they’ll be determined or defined over time based on the density of followers on a scatterplot.
This notion of increasing specialization of social media by affinity and interest has been a minor recurring theme of Gillmor Gang discussions in recent months.
I do occasional maintenance on this widget because it has a couple hundred installs, so I should. Its value decreases when it doesn’t include enough timely searches.
(Click on “Search this” to refresh the widget and try another search.)
The rotating content leans heavily to Twitter Search because I think it’s such a fascinating way to get something of a handle on the pulse of opinion. To update it I add searches, and I also check the current searches to see if the results still show recent activity. (See the archive of currently rotating searches as well as retired searches. Note to Expression Engine heads: that archive page shows open entries for the active searches and closed entries for the retired ones—so easy.)
I’m getting to it now; thank you for your patience, just had to set it up. I’ve been surprised that interest in certain search terms has not waned as much as I would have expected. For example, “auto industry” and “iphone+storm” are not in the news as much as they were a few weeks ago when I added them, but they persist in racking up a lot of current results.
A slightly different sort of custom tool that tracks persistence of interest could be useful for research conducted by media outlets, and maybe other types of businesses, but I’m more tuned in to media and think of it first. Examples:
- Mainstream media, like monthly print magazines, having longer lead times, to see what people are still interested in.
- Even for more instant media, like TV or blogs, it could be handy for planning more-produced, better-researched features. If there’s no longevity to public interest in a given topic, it might not be worth the investment.
Of course this assumes there is a spot of value in the idea of enduring interest, and not just in the latest thing. Sometimes I despair of our “newest is all there is” way of looking at news and everything else.
If you wanted to go all radical, you might even say that sustained public interest in a topic maps to its importance and consequence. Nah…
It’s nothing Twitter is not aware of, I’m sure, but here’s a further anecdote.
I’ve been doodling around with a widget that rotates a number of what I think are interesting timely searches, mostly on Twitter search, but including some others.
Early last week the web was abuzz with rumors about a $99 iPhone offered by Wal-Mart, so I make it one of the widget’s searches. Each day there was more spam in the stream. I tried my best to filter it with minus switches, and finally had to give up.
I expect I’ll have to abandon the gas+price search soon for the same reason. I added another three switches today, but I have a feeling it’s just a matter of time before I won’t be able to manage it that way.
Craftier developers will know better ways to filter out certain users based on their tweet patterns and put them in 3rd party apps or in Twitter search itself. On the other hand, not putting the controls in Twitter’s public search might be a way to create value for a corporate product. But that would be scarcity thinking.
Mommy bloggers, who tend to hang out on Twitter, were offended by the video’s copy, and the tone of the narration, which implies that wearing a baby in a sling or other carrying apparatus amounts to an affectation. It offended me, too, even though I wasn’t a baby wearer as a young mom. (I tried it, and it didn’t suit me, but not for any lifestyle reason—I just never felt I had the proper purchase on my baby; I liked belonging to the constant contact species, and carried my kids around a lot.)
Telling the folks you’re trying to persuade that their preferences are an affectation is the dumbest aspect. Think about it. It’s like trying to sell Visine to iPhone users by helpfully informing them they only bought their phone to look cool, but there’s help for you dumbasses. Visine can save you from yourselves, save you from the eyestrain you were dimwitted, vain and phony enough to inflict on yourselves.
A few commenters—looks like mostly guys and controversy trolls—are eyerolling or belittling the outrage. In which camp are the people at Johnson & Johnson’s agency who cooked this thing up? I do think there are culture camps here, and it’s because babywearing is still seen as a ”hippie thing”—not so much now as it was 20-30 years ago, but the perception lingers.
So, when the voiceover talent seems to curl her lip in derision at women who want to look like good moms, I gotta tell you, coming off the culture wars fought during the election campaign, it feels to me like Sarah Palin or Ann Coulter is talking to me in that video. And she’s saying “I’m so sick of your hippie shit—your latte-drinking, hybrid-driving, baby-slinging ways. Why don’t you go live on a commune and stop influencing normal heartland moms to adopt your godless ways.”
Sound like a stretch? Maybe, but you really can’t argue with perceptions, and that’s how the read struck me. Which is why, as so many bloggers have pointed out, J&J should have tested the tone with the target audience. Who approved that voiceover anyway? That’s who I’d blame, and send the agency’s creative staff to tonedeaf school.
Check it out. There’s an underlying pitch in it for SocialFlow, a Betaworks company, but that is OK with me since it is a subtle pitch and it tells a tale you won’t hear elsewhere about social media reputation and how news takes shape online. It swirls around in little eddies that gather force and sometimes whoosh into the Main Stream. 
Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.
But about the 
