How Twitter Finally Taught Me to be an Editor

I’ve been an editor for 20-plus years. But Twitter—that idiot desktop companion for the work-averse—has become my mid-career editing coach.

This may be due to how I use Twitter, at least some of the time: Less for top-of-brain me-spatter and more for tiny reports or editorials.

Fact is, it’s tough to convey any substance in 140 characters. You have to carefully weigh every word, letter and space. Even punctuation.

Here’s an example. I wanted to share a delicious, fantastically gross item of neighborhood gossip. But it’s not for this blog. So I Tweeted:

House that was site of mass murder 30 years ago–and where following owners’ dead body sat for 4 weeks in Dec–for sale in my ‘hood! Cheap!

Or this (unattractive) detour into moralizing. I Tweeted this after I observed the right-wingnuts’ tasteless glee at Kennedy’s brain tumor news:

The hate for Kennedy online right now is horrific. USAToday comment ref’d Kopeckne family. People can be so small. *That’s* the tragedy.

Okay, the prose is cramped, the comments elliptical. But writing substantial Tweets teaches a key journalism skill: Make every word count.

If I were teaching journalism (the academy shudders), I’d have students edit 500-word stories as Tweets. Not for the result, but the process.

I’ve edited miles of copy in my day. Nonetheless, I find that every time I sit down to write a meaningful Tweet I hone my craft a bit more.

Thinking about all this today, I decided to try a music review. It’s labored, I know. But I had my (brief) say about a song that moved me.

Nominate Tom Waits for Pulitzer: “Road to Peace” is growly, pounding, horrific news report on Mideast bloodwars. Quotes Henry Kissinger (!)

Yes, I may have lost it entirely. I’m writing in 140 word chunks and just nominated a musician for a Pulitzer. Go ahead. Tweet about it.

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p.s. Every paragraph in this item is 140 characters or fewer. Whether it’s admirably tight, barely coherent or pointless, I leave to others.

A Google Health Clinical Exam

Not one more pixel need be spilt about the issues of privacy, security, HIPAA, metastatic data, third-party crashers, or corporate imperial overreach raised by the debut of Google Health. Let’s just snap on the latex gloves and do a quick exam. This won’t hurt a bit.

Three brief clinical observations follow:

Your conditions, your choice

You can enter your “conditions” either by entering text or choosing from a disheartening alphabetic menu of bodily afflictions, from Aarskog Syndrome to Zollinger-Ellison Syndrome. The list is 20 screens by 3 columns deep when spread out on one endless page.

Immediately preceding the last entry is “Zits”–a nice bit of diction that helps reach users where they live, so to speak, to humanize the Google Machine. As with many conditions that populate the picklist (no pun), there’s a pre-loaded search for zits. But only certain conditions are pre-loaded with searches. Although “whiteheads” was on the list, when I typed it in there was no stored search. When I did the search myself up popped the zits search results.

To give the product a test run as you can see below I chose a number of conditions from the list — WHICH, IF YOU ARE AN INSURER, EMPLOYER OR ACQUAINTANCE, I ASSURE YOU ARE ENTIRELY MADE UP AND DON’T APPLY TO ME AT ALL, IN FACT I AM PERFECTLY HEALTHY. I also tried to throw Brother Google a curve ball by describing the same conditions using several different terms, i.e., arthritis, osteoarthritis and bad knees. I was permitted to add these as I wished. To see if there was any filtering or databasing of my conditions going on, I outright invented a disease by lashing together some of my favorite Greek roots: pyohemoflatalgia. (Go ahead, look ‘em up.) Brother Google didn’t blink.

Conclusion: Google isn’t databasing my conditions. I’m just entering text, and the alpha picklist is just there to prompt people to identify diseases by common names.

Google Health “Research” Offers Less–and Therefore Better–Content than a Google Search

Hit the “research” link accompanying any condition and up pops a neatly tailored page on the topic. Most of the page (on, say, osteoarthritis) consists of a spectacularly workmanlike article from the utterly competent information provider A.D.A.M. The right rail has a set of links curated by some unknown hand or machine. Depending on the topic you may get a few blurbs of news items (by some method culled from the longer, messier, far less coherent Google News results on the same topic), links to Google Groups, Google Scholar articles or related searches (”search trends”).

Observation: The regular–i.e., non-Google Health–Google searches on the same topics provide better results than Google searches on non-medical topics. (Google has for some time used a service called “Google Co-op” to serve up results from only selected health content providers.) This is good–a tacit acknowledgment by Brother Google that searches for lymphoma are more important than those for, say, “David winner Idol”. STILL, THE FIRST LISTING ON THE TOP OF GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS FOR MANY HEALTH-RELATED “SEARCH TREND” TOPICS IS OFTEN FROM WIKIPEDIA. WOULD YOU GUYS STOP THAT?

Did somebody mention “beta”?

We all know how Google overuses the term “beta” to (correctly, often) imply an evolving product and to (necessarily, often) seek forgiveness for bugs that haven’t been scrubbed out yet.

Well: After creating “my” “personal” health “record,” I tried the Google Health (beta) find-a-doctor function. “diabetes” doctors in “Bethesda, Maryland.” Enter.

This keystroke should have triggered a klaxon audio file that screamed BETABETABETA!!! Ah-OOO-Ga! Ah-OOO-Ga!

I don’t know, maybe that top endocrinologist is staying at the Grand Hyatt Washington. Or maybe he’s taken a job with the Department of Health and Human Services? (Or is it the Department of Transportation?) Who can tell?

Anyhow, the seven minutes I have for basic clinical exams is over. It was fun giving Google Health a quick once-over. But it’s a good thing the medical record is a fake. I don’t think it’s ready for circulation yet.

In fact, there were enough suspicious observations in my quick exam that. . .I think I may have to schedule a biopsy next. Who knows what’ll turn up?

So Simple. So Smart.

On Tuesday night, while results from the Kentucky and Oregon Democrat primaries were coming in, the New York Times had this wonderful tool above the fold on its home page.

Meantime, the folks over at CNN.com offer the considerably more complicated (if subtle) calculator shown below.

Making complex material simple but accurate is one of the highest callings of journalism. Both sites attack this particular complexity well. But I give the nod to nytimes.com.

Anti-Social Media: McCainpedia

The new McCainpedia is a landmark in the history of digital media. It exploits public familiarity with a hip new communication form (in this case, wikis, which are used for group content creation and editing) and then aggressively misapplies it. This launch ranks alongside the first time a newspaper published a reporter’s blog posts in print, or when a TV news program first put faux-clickable icons on the TV screens.

The McCainpedia, published by the Democratic National Committee’s Research, Communications, and Internet teams, presents a nastyfun collection of material about McCain’s alleged flip-flops, misreadings of history, contradictions, bad ideas, inexplicable votes, curious associations and so on. Great reading, all of it, and I’m sure some portion of the material is factual.

But the McCainPedia is a wiki in lockdown. People can’t edit, question, add or remove stuff. It’s an example of anti-social media. It’s Potemkin Village 2.0. The wisdom-of-the-few. Solosourcing. Citizen journalism without the citizens. It’s Democratic but not democratic.

I don’t want to suggest this isn’t a wise or effective digital communication tactic. It’s a great way to consolidate party-approved rhetoric and create a catchbasin for those looking to sip some DNC bile. I’m guessing it’ll get major SEO mojo and will pop up when people conduct searches for things like “Keating Five” and “in Iraq 100 years”.

Despite its brassy exploitation of a new form of social media, McCain is another Obama poli-tech victory. So far, McCain’s digital efforts seem like those of grammar school kids learning HTML. The e-Bama efforts, by contrast, seem to be the work of college sophomores with lousy grades but perfect SATs who spend all night in the computer lab writing programs that screw with the administration. Obama’s digital team is giving McCain’s folks a wedgie every day. We’ll see if Obama continues to lead in the digital derby as the race continues.

But for me, this all raises a more interesting question. Would it even be possible to create a real wiki that collected facts–facts!–regarding the key issues and the candidates’ positions?

Oh, I know there are formally assembled and authored documents that attempt to do this. But that’s traditional one-way publishing.

But could a real, honest-to-god, publicly authored and maintained wiki possibly provide a level-headed and factual look at the things people really should know before they vote? How could such a wiki not be immediately overrun by stooges, tools, creeps, flamers, neo-National Socialists, nutroot populists, chindrizzle party hacks and blind raging lunatics?

Which is to say, to open the question even more broadly, is the pure wiki format applicable to content areas about which members of the public have extraordinarily strong feelings? And matter so much to the future of the public?

[A tip o' the fez to TechPresident for bringing this to my attention.]

Business Week’s Twitter Article in 140 Characters

Maybe a million users, enthused/baffled/addicted. Business infiltrates. Maybe a legit interlinked social media platform. But where’s money?

n.b. The article itself is so full of show-offey, high-concept, meta-media hyperlinks it’s nearly unreadable. The above is my public service.

iMedix: Social Search that Creeps Me Out

Oh, geez. Deb21 wants to chat again.

Here I am, trying to look up some information about tinnitus–a k a ringing in the ears, a condition which has recently afflicted a member of my family–and Deb21 [I've changed her handle to protect the innocent ] wants to chat. A little photo box pops up on my screen, with the icky solicitation “I’m online! Chat with me now!” There’s even an audible little ping whenever she implores me to spend some time with her.

Welcome to iMedix, a “social search” site in the personal health space.

In concept, social search is powerful: Combine the algorithmically valid but brain-dead health search results of a typical search engine with the “wisdom of the crowds”–the aggregated opinions of real humans who can validate the information they found worthwhile when dealing with the same issue. Add to that the ability to connect with those people, and (goes the theory) you’ve got something good.

Like any 2.0 community, iMedix faces the challenge of creating critical mass: A community with nobody home is in a death spiral from Day One. But building critical mass from scratch is no small task in mid-2008: Early adopters are oversubscribed to social networks and the mainstream hasn’t figured out what all the fuss is about. Every business based on network power needs people. A lot of them. Fast.

Which brings us back to Deb21. iMedix seems to be trying a bit too hard to get people to join the party, dispatching its youthful crowd to flag folks into the front door.

First it was Ann, a comely 29-year-old community manager interested in fitness and lifestyle. I acquiesced to her friend request but haven’t heard from her since.

I accepted friendship with a fellow calling himself neurosurgeon_55, figuring it’s never a bad idea to know a brain surgeon. But then I discovered he’s a 17-year-old guy in India, whose personal statement reads, in part:

Then we will ve a lots of chat (humourous)but valuable beniffitng both of us in the long run so what r u thinking of? Hmmmmmmmm..lets go ahead and chat.Yo man!!

An unsettling number of people who have set up profiles in iMedix are attractive and young and look, at least to these middle-aged eyes, like the happy-go-lucky group with cool haircuts and great teeth you see in ads for premium liquors.

Here is the problem: People with health problems have, well. . .health problems. They want to see that people like them, people who have something valuable to share, are in a community.

You will certainly find these people at iMedix: There’s a 53-year-old woman whose college age daughter has bipolar and is an abusive relationship. Good lord, the woman needs help. Call me too fast to judgment, but I don’t think neurosurgeon_55 is the guy to offer her support and guidance.

To be fair: iMedix is in beta. It appears they’ve seeded the site with the folks they have around–their young staff and (it appears) their social network contacts.

Building a 2.0 health community is hard. Not many people have gotten it right, and the very concept is fraught with danger. But social networks are based on the company they keep. And no matter who that company is, in the health space I’m not sure they should jump onto your screen saying “I’m online! Chat with me now!”

As for the search part of the social search: The information on tinnitus was really pretty good, better than what Brother Google served up on page one. Link number one was a direct hit.

Along the way I found the profile of someone named Niroo. She is 24 and says she has hearing loss and is interested in tinnitus. She lives in Iran. I sent her an e-mail. Haven’t heard from her yet. [#]

Punchline, added 5/19/2008

Seven days after writing the entry above, I received the following message in my iMedix mailbox.

Dearest One,
My name is Miss Ashandy,i am a single girl never marrie i saw your profile today at (www.imedix.com)Ashandy100@yahoo.com) and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for (i believe we can move from here.
I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.Miss Ashandy (Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life
Yours Lover
Miss Ashandy Rolland

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