7 Reasons Tina Brown is Spanking Arianna Huffington’s Butt
January 28, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 6 Comments
About six months into the adventure, Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast news-and-comment website is already far superior to Arianna Huffington’s fantastically popular supra-blog Huffington Post. Why, you ask?
1. The Daily Beast delivers less content than HuffPo. Web users need people smart enough to tell us what to ignore. These people are called “editors.”
2. DB views the world with a cocked eyebrow. HuffPo is wide-eyed. Skeptics are more interesting to spend time with than believers.
3. When you’re hungry, DB is a funky buffet line. HuffPo is a food bank.
4. DB understands that politics exists within pop culture. HuffPo thinks pop culture is the sideshow to politics.
5. DB, despite its proprietor’s print heritage, understands that web users scan, dip and click. HuffPo, despite its web-native heritage, thinks web users “read articles.”
6. Daily Beast publishes some original work by accomplished professional writers who are paid for their work in U.S. dollars. HuffPo depends mostly on the generous contributions of people like you.
7. Daily Beast is easy on the eyes. HuffPo is a beast.
Twittercize: A New Take on What Twitter is “For”
January 26, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 5 Comments
Despite all bloviatons to the contrary, nobody knows what Twitter is “for”–any more than we know what a 3G phone is “for.” New technologies are developed, we play around and see what they can do, the technology is developed further, the cycle repeats. Users, over time, determine what a technology is “for.”
Which brings me to Twittercize.
This mini-service may seem a lightweight fluff that’s irrelevant to the way Twitter is most widely used. But it demonstrates aspects of the microblogging platform that I haven’t seen before–and that suggest new possibilities for what this annoying, persistent, fascinating communications platform can do.
The Twittercize profile sends Tweets every hour that describe a simple one-minute exercise you can do at your desk. A recent example:
Table Flips: Forearms under a table or desk, palms up, press and hold for five. Repeat 10 times! about 13 hours agofrom web
That’s all it does. It’s run by a writer in Denver who seems to be winging it and figuring out what he’s doing as he goes.
What strikes me is that Twittercize exploits three aspects of the platform that are rarely put into play.
- Location [at least for web-based Twitter use]. Twittercize knows where you are.
- Profile. Twittercize knows how you live. Desktop Twitteurs almost by definition are deskbound wretches, quietly cultivating repetitive stress injuries and the minor pathologies that result from butt-in-chair syndrome. Easy movements and stretching exercises can provide relief.
- Timing. Twittercize knows when you need it. By sending updates every hour or so, Twittercize acts as a prompt timed to your needs, not its broadcast schedule.
Twittercize knows where you are, who you are, what you need and when you need it.
Right now, most people use Twitter to broadcast stuff when it occurs to them or when things are published elsewhere, essentially without regard to the audience and what it needs. I wonder whether creative people can look at the Twittercize model can figure out interesting ways to take advantage of those aspects of the platform.
And, along the way, continue to expand the definition of what the heck Twitter is “for.”
The Weekest Links: Nuke.com, Google Air, Twitter Surgery
January 23, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 1 Comment
If it’s Friday it’s time to sift through the dustpan of another amazing, amusing and alarming week on the Interwebs. . .
1. Ground Zero
A Google maplett that lets you select a munition and a type of nuclear weapon and see what sort of “thermal damage” it might do to the target area. Frighteningly, the destruction rendered by the blast of “Little Boy” [Hiroshima] seems. . .well, not all that bad relative to today’s weapons. Or an asteroid. [h/t Very Short List]
A public affairs arm of the USAF has a modest news-and-info blog on that operates on. . .Blogger! Say, is this another one of those Google-inside-deals-with-the-government things? If federal offices start using Orkut to “create citizen communities,” we’ll know something really stinks.
. . .and finally, our regular sighting of the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse ™:
The captions appearing in the “comments” under this photo, which depicts Henry Ford Health System surgeons describing the action and taking questions, are priceless. Favorite: “At least they’re not searching Wikipedia.” [n.b. While the docs pictured above were scrubbed in, neither was the "primary" surgeon.]
InauguRate09: The Tweeple’s Balls
January 21, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · Leave a Comment
There were so many Tweets flying over D.C. for the past few days it’s surprising the Air Force didn’t scramble the F-15s to secure the air space. I won’t try to aggregate all the aggregations of Inaugural Tweets here. But this project caught my eye:
The InauguRate09 widget [note to lawyers: copyright that one for 2012!] was created by Thummit, a D.C. based ratings-and-recommendation service currently in beta.
It harvested Tweets about various inaugural events and did basic semantic analysis–parsing the language to determine whether a Tweet describing that event rated it a “thumbs up,” “thumbs down,” or something in between. It tallied the data and came up with the rankings above.
I suppose it’s not much of a surprise that the We Are One concert on the mall ranked higher than the Mid-Atlantic Ball ["So nice to see you, Madame State Senator!"].
But if the Thummit data can be trusted, Google’s hullabaloo was more fun than Al Gore’s Green fling–and both were rated higher than the high-gloss soiree thrown by perpetually reluctant interviewee Arianna Huffington.
This is all fun stuff, and a good window into how the Twitter ecosystem is being used by third-party developers to tell lots of different stories. Thummit allows users to rate local restaurants via mobile devices and the web, but it is working on other projects like this that parse other public commentary into yea/nay evaluations.
Just to check Thummit’s analytic work, I dug into the Tweetstream to check out that bottom-ranking “official” Youth Ball. It didn’t take much semantic analysis on my part to verify which way the thumbs were indeed pointed:
lol youth ball.what a joke. from twitter on 2009-01-21T06:40:36Z
Youth Ball FAIL. I got yelled at by cops and wasn’t allowed to see obama or kanye. Ditto for about 1000 others who paid $75 for tix. from twitter on 2009-01-21T06:28:51Z
youth ball, huh? is there a not quite middle age ball? from twitter on 2009-01-21T06:08:15Z
Let Us Now Praise @Colleen_Graffy
January 19, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · Leave a Comment
While the final hours of the Bush administration tick away, it’s time to note that Colleen Graffy’s tenure as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs ends too.
If you know her at all, it’s as the “Twittering Diplomat.” Operating as @colleen_graffy, she sent a regular stream of messages updating the world–or, to be fair, about 800 followers–on her travels and activities as a Bush administration foot soldier representing the United States. the range of her updates is illustrated by these two successive Tweets from the evening of January 3 to the morning of January 4:
Preparing for the Smith-Mundt Symposium on Jan 13. Reading comments on MountainRunner’s blog (just google it).
Apple Store 1 to 1 lessons v cool. thx all 4 encouraging me to get a Mac. Love it. Who is yr best blog model in case i learn how to do that?
Others have strong ideas about whether her Tweetery had diplomatic value. You’ll find a superb summary of the public discussion of Graffy’s Twittering on the personal blog of State Department webbist Darren Krape. [More links below.]
But from where I sit, Graffy’s contribution goes far beyond whatever goodwill she generated with the people of Armenia. Intentionally or not, she has done more to demonstrate how new media is transforming the world than a conference hall full of 2.0-vangelists.
Some numbers suggest that between 4 and 5 million people use Twitter. Maybe. But it’s still largely an early adopter phenomenon, and I suspect that at least a plurality of users operates in the worlds of media and marketing. They use Twitter to promote their blogs, their businesses, themselves and–alley oop!–their own expertise at “leveraging” Twitter.
[Let me rush to confess I am one of these very people, just as wide-eyed and opportunistic about social media as the rest of 'em. To ensure you don't fall completely under our sway, watch this brief video about New Media Douchebags.]
But by putting Twitter in play to support U.S. diplomacy, Graffy has forced Twitter under the noses of people involved with geopolitics and foreign policy–serious-minded, often intelligent people who, for worse or better, play a significant role in determining who gets what around the globe.
For all its annoyances and fatuities, Twitter demonstrates better than anything else the continuous, real-time, global, egalitarian, inclusive, transparent and completely uncontrollable nature of communications today. Nobody who uses Twitter for a few weeks can doubt that the world of top-down media [or government] speaking to a passive, ignorant audience is over.
Whenever there’s no turning back from something, people often say “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.” In social media circles we like to say “You can’t drain the pee from the swimming pool.” [Sorry, I forget who to attribute that to.]
Whatever. The point is there’s no turning back, and the people who [not to put too fine a point on it] sort of control the world now understand this. I have no idea what else Colleen Graffy accomplished during her tenure. But I’m guessing her Twittering will prove to be her biggest.
More Links
Graffy’s Washington Post op-ed on her Twittering
Graffy’s response to a blog entry critical of her Twittering
Disproof of Concept: Change.org’s Ideas for Change
January 6, 2009 by Craig Stoltz · 10 Comments
Change.org is a social network where people who care about a variety of causes–global warming, hunger, gay rights, animal rights, worker rights and a bewildering range of others–find kindred spirits, action groups and all sorts of information. It also accepts donations on behalf of the non-profits in its network.
As a platform to help people connect and collaborate, it’s a classic–and admirable–use of social media.
The group’s Ideas for Change campaign, however, is another story. It’s a ripe demonstration of what happens when a “wisdom of the crowds” effort is overtaken by activists whose real agenda is self-promotion, not the public interest.
Here’s how Ideas for Change works: The site invited users to suggest ideas for change [over 7,700 submissions] which were then reduced [via over 280,000 votes] to a “short” list of 90. In round two, each site visitor is allowed 10 votes to distribute among the causes he or she feels most important. The final list of Top 10 causes will be “delivered” to the Obama Administration and Congress via a press conference at the National Press Club.
I suspect you know where this is heading.
As of this writing, the top two causes on Ideas for Change are. . .to legalize marijuana and end the war on drugs. Number 13 offers what could charitably be considered a slight variant, “decriminalizing” marijuana.
To be fair, other top vote-getters involve matters more central to the public conversation: the Patriot Act, marriage equality, universal healthcare and green initiatives. [All suggestions would likely be considered "liberal" responses to the issues. Nothing wrong with that.]
But there at Number 9 stands “Save Small Business from CPSIA“–a plea to free small toymakers from the strangling yoke of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. [According to the site, the 2007 law is designed to ensure the products of large toymakers are certified free of lead, phthalates and other dangerous stuff, yet apparently captures small toymakers in its regulatory net.]
Number 9 is certainly a legitimate matter. So is the idea of decriminalizing weed.
But the thought that the tens of thousands of activists who participate in America’s civic life believe these to be among the most important issues to bring before the administration and Congress is fatuous.
I imagine the leaders of Change.org having a hard time presenting that list of issues, so redolent with pot smoke, at the National Press Club without humiliation. Yes, Mr. President, activist America has spoken, and we want our bongs back, dammit! And get the hell of small toymakers’ backs!
The explanation for this unfortunate outcome is so obvious I can hardly bring myself to type the words: A small number of activists organized their followers to vote for their cause without regard to what they really think are the most important issues facing America.
As the daily results of Digg have demonstrated over the years, opinion-aggregation sites can be gamed, and usually are. [Top Digg'd item of the last 30 days, as I write this: Digg this if your tired of power users stealing stories.] Ditto sites that review restaurants, hotels and fashion.
Applying a game-able system to serious civic matters just isn’t very wise-as the Obama Administration’s effort of an eerily similar name, Change.gov, is beginning to discover. [Change.org had its name first!]
Let’s all agree to this: There are many ways to use new media to involve citizens in the process of change. “Voting for your favorites” is not one of them.
Okay, so what can be done at this point to save Change.org from itself?
Why, game the system some more, of course!
Activists who really do care about improving the lot of this dysfunctional nation–or at least want to spare a worthy effort like Change.org public humiliation–should go to Change.org and vote in an intellectually honest manner.
Having a hard time? Look way at the bottom: “Create a permanent constituency to end genocide” needs some love. Only 37 votes so far.
