The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party

Arthur S. Brisbane, the public editor of The New York Times, turned his attention this week to the newsroom's use of Twitter. He quoted from an e-mail interview with me, which I am posting in full here, with a few tweaks and links. The Public Editor: I’m working on a column about how Times staffers use Twitter: the journalistic benefits, the marketing benefits and any other benefits – as well as the costs, whatever they might be. I am, I confess, a newcomer to using Twitter and wonder whether it is a boon or a waste of time.

@palafo: Is talking to people a waste of time? Sometimes it is, I guess. Twitter is a conversation. You get what you put into it. I don’t think talking to our readers is ever a waste of time.

That’s the short answer. Here’s the long one.

I view my Twitter account @palafo as part of my identity. It does not belong to The Times any more than my name does.

But The Times is part of my identity, too, because I am an editor here. For that reason, I behave on Twitter as I do in the newsroom or on a public panel. I try not to say anything on Twitter that I wouldn’t say in front of a live microphone with cameras rolling.

Background: I joined Twitter in 2007 when few people in the newsroom knew what Twitter was, and I didn’t hide my Times employment, but I didn’t advertise it at first, either. At the time, I was on the Metro desk, where I was editor of the City Room blog. We were always looking for ways to engage online with New Yorkers. The blog had an automated Twitter feed, but it had fewer followers than my account (still true, alas). It turns out that a personal touch on Twitter was more successful than spitting out headlines. So I identified myself on Twitter as the blog’s editor and started interacting with readers through it.

In my current job, editor for news presentation, I oversee copy editing and production for print and Web, and I continue to experiment with all the social media tools, including Twitter. I have a responsibility to understand the digital media innovations transforming journalism and the news business.

But I admit it: I love this stuff. I’ve been on the Internet since it was the Arpanet, when I was a teenager in the 1970s. Twitter reminds me of the computer bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups and other online forums of the early days. The rest of the world has finally caught up.

Now, to your specific questions...

The Public Editor:What are the benefits to you of tweeting and what kind of content do you tweet?

I follow about 1,100 news organizations and blogs, competitors, Times colleagues and other journalists, people who follow the news closely, media critics, tech experts, some friends and acquaintances and anyone or anything anything else that catches my interest. I try to pare the list back from time to time. It was easier to follow when it was closer to 500. I also have a number of Twitter lists with even more accounts that I consult from time to time. I have a list that shows how Twitter looks to me.

These Twitter users “curate” the Web for me, which means they find, analyze and comment on useful links that interest me far more quickly than I could ever do for myself. If they link to something that grabs my attention, I will generally look at it or save it for later. I don’t read everything. I dip into Twitter when I have time. The analogy is a cocktail party. You can’t join every conversation, but you drift through the crowd and stop now and then. Important or significant news gets repeated, and it sometimes shows up in the trending topics.

Often I learn about news from Twitter. Your predecessor, Clark Hoyt, wrote about Twitter’s role in a big story in 2009 that was an aha moment for me and the newsroom, when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River.

But Twitter is more than a tip sheet or a place to find sources. It is important to remember the “social” part of social media.

Since the people on Twitter share so much useful information with me, I try to give back to them by interacting there. I don’t write about my lunch, or anything too personal. Mostly, I share links. The links are generally to news articles, blog posts, interesting uses of digital media, pictures, video, you name it. I follow our newsroom policies for personal Web writing, which permit journalism reflections, and lively commentary on one’s avocations like music and food, but forbid taking stands on divisive public issues.

I am not a Times spokesman or a marketer. I share a lot of our journalism on Twitter, because it is excellent. I don’t feel obligated to do so, and I don’t share everything. The article has to interest me personally as a reader and be something that I think my Twitter followers will like. People can tell when you are just randomly pumping your own stuff or your employer’s offerings. Luckily, Times journalism — I am biased about this -- is almost always of a high caliber.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is asynchronous, so I am followed by about 10 times more people than I follow back. Sometimes they want to talk to me. So I read all “mentions” directed at me on Twitter. People know I’m busy, so they don’t abuse the opportunity. I ignore anonymous gripes, but people who use their real identities are generally polite even if they are upset about something The Times has done. If someone like that has a question, a correction, or a criticism, or a technical problem, I try to answer it or find someone who can.

The Public Editor: Do readers benefit and, if so, how? Does The Times benefit and how?

As everybody knows, over the last several years Twitter and social media have grown at a great rate, and many news sites, including The Times, now receive a growing amount of traffic from referrals on Twitter and other social media sites. Having our journalists on Twitter also translates into credibility with readers who live their lives online. It shows we understand the digital world and how it works.

More important, The Times and its readers benefit from a newsroom that understands digital culture and is familiar with the conversations about the news on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, blogs and similar sites.

The news report and readers also benefit from the news-gathering power of tools like Twitter. Brian Stelter has used Twitter to develop ideas that have turned into articles.Rob Mackey of The Lede blog (@thelede) has shown how news events from earthquakes to political revolutions have played out on Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms.

In general, sites like Twitter have accelerated news competition. Not all of the effects of high-speed social media have been positive. Rumors and bad information spread faster — but they are also debunked faster. The pressure to compete in real time, and the transparency and immediate feedback from readers can be nerve-racking and destabilizing. But competition is good for everyone. We are closer to our audience, and they are closer to us. That results in a better news report.

The Public Editor: Are there any costs to you, or the Times, of using Twitter as a tool? Surely, it takes time. Does that time subtract from the time available to do your job? Any other costs?

It doesn’t take away from the job. If anything, the job probably eats into many more hours of my personal time than it should. Or so my wife tells me.

Part of my job is to read The Times and its competitors, a task that could fill every hour of my day if I let it. Twitter is a useful tool for figuring out priorities for my attention. It doesn’t take that much time. At work, I use an iPhone app, and there’s always down time, walking down the hall, waiting for stragglers at a meeting, riding the elevator, while I’m grabbing a bite to eat. It only takes an extra second to save a link or share it. At home, I’ll look at Web sites and Twitter on my laptop, phone or iPad while I’m watching TV or listening to music, a podcast or an audiobook. I am busiest on Twitter at night and on weekends. The Web and Twitter have definitely cut into time I used to spend reading books.

Another cost is the occasional irritation of family and friends, although e-mail is a worse cause of inattention and wasted time. I’ve been trying harder lately to turn off devices and get off the grid away from work. It’s not easy. The people I know are like me: They talk about the news a lot, and they want to know the latest news, too.

###

Addendum:As I mentioned on Twitter, I might have chosen a different metaphor had I known the headline was going to be "A Cocktail Party With Readers." The analogy is as old as Twitter, and useful for newbies, but it doesn't capture everything:

Other analogies for Twitter: Cafe. Neighborhood. Village square. Crowded public meeting. Parade ground. War zone.Sun Mar 13 15:41:30 via webPatrick LaForge

palafo

@palafo Classroom back row. Street corner. Water cooler. Kindergarten. TED.Sun Mar 13 15:48:12 via EchofonMiss Scorpio

gemini_scorpio

@palafo Real-time peer-review; collaborative footnotes and bibliography.Sun Mar 13 16:07:31 via webJenny K

jenny_flaneuse

@palafo Roman bath house with hash tags. #TwitterSun Mar 13 15:44:18 via EchofonDavid Herrold

davidherrold

@palafo I thought analogy worked well to convey level of involvement in conversations, but i'd prefer cafe for a.m., maybe mosh pit for p.m.Sun Mar 13 15:55:36 via webSasha Koren

SashaK

A Ride to Kaffe 1668 for Los Volcanes

One July weekend, I had the opportunity to combine two of my favorite activities -- riding my bike through Manhattan and visiting new coffee shops. My family was traveling elsewhere, and New York had not yet fallen into the drippy hot torpor that has marked recent days. I rode down the west side a bit, diverted to to the Hudson River trail, then passed through TriBeCa, Chinatown, SoHo and my old East Village stomping grounds before chugging up the East Side -- a loop of sorts.

I made a pass by La Colombe Torrefaction, but I had already tried beans from there via B. Koffie, so I decided to check out Kaffe 1668, one of the shops highlighted in The Times a couple of months ago. Coffee Guatemala Antigua Los Volcanes

Purchased July 3 at Kaffe 1668, 275 Greenwich St., TriBeCa.

Roasted on June 27 by Plowshares Coffee Roasters of Hillburn, N.Y.

Description Creamy body; delicate, clean acidity; milk chocolate and orange citrus; smooth, sweet, dry finish.

In the cup I picked out this particular coffee because I had not tried anything from this roaster before. In the shop, I had a coffee brewed expertly by the cup in a Clover press. That was a Panama variety from Denver-based Novo. Full bodied, and smooth, with a milk chocolate flavor, this coffee was delicious, as anything brewed in an $11,000 machine should be. I drank it hot, because that's how I like coffee, though it would have been a good day for cold brew, which was also available.

The shop, located across from a Whole Foods, adds some style and ambiance to an otherwise mall-like block of sterility downtown. The front opens out on the street, and there are interesting light fixtures and a communal wood table, where I sat. I was able to lock my bike within view on a low fence around a tree, and there was more ample bike parking across the street near the Whole Foods.

There's free WiFi with your purchase, which I used to browse the shop's Web site, with its entertaining cartoons. As best I can tell, Kaffe 1668 doesn't have its own roaster, but features beans from Intelligentsia and other high-end roasters like Novo.

I left with a bag of this Guatemalan strapped to my bike. The bag itself is an impressive bit of green-ish technology, made from paper with a ziplock that can be resealed.

Plowshares, which has an excellent Web site, gives this description: "Los Volcanes coffee is grown in the valley's rich volcanic soils that were formed by the three volcanoes (Agua, Acatenango, Fuego)... Most of the coffee here is cultivated at 1,500 - 1,700 meters above sea level which helps gives this coffee a pronounced acidity that is clean but not overpowering." The Antigua valley is a prime coffee growing region about 40 kilometers from the city of that name in Guatemala, according to Plowshares. The beans with this name come from 34 growers who banded together in a cooperative in 2000.

I have been drinking a regular cup or two brewed at home every morning for the last couple of weeks. I don't have any complaint about it, but it hasn't been bowling me over. It does pass my no-milk test, which means it is not overly acidic to my taste. The citrus didn't overwhelm me, which is sometimes a complaint I have with the single-origin coffees promoted by many coffee aficionados. It is remarkably light-bodied and smooth, which is good on these sweltering days, though I tend to prefer a fuller flavor and more than a trace of chocolate.

Still, it was well worth the ride.

Since I am still dabbling with social media, I also documented this trip on Foursquare and Posterous. And now I am promoting this Wordpress blog post on Facebook and Twitter. On some level, I suppose this is a longer, multi-platform version of the classic Twitter update, "I am eating a sandwich."

(Yes, I am drinking a cup of coffee.)

Fazenda Sertaozinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil!

I've been neglecting the blog for quite a while. It's so much easier to Twitter, or post Facebook updates, or check in with Foursquare, that it's hard to work up the head of steam it takes to write about coffees that have only mildly impressed me, or books that I haven't managed to finish, or what have you. It's the doldrums of winter, the eve of February, the shortest month on paper and the longest in the northeastern mind. So here we find ourselves, whoever you are, whoever I am, in the iPad interregnum, the post State of the Union, the short bleak days of winter, run out of words and thoughts. I've tried a few of the winter selections at Café Grumpy -- the El Salvadoran, the Rwandan, and of course the only espresso standby Heartbreaker -- and they were all good, but I can't really recall with any clarity their individual qualities. Let's pronounce them good and move on. But with the start of my kid's second semester drawing me back down into the Chelsea neighborhood more regularly, I picked up this Grumpy roast with the Tolkienesque name, and it's getting me through the dark days.

Coffee: Fazenda Sertaozinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Roasted: Jan. 17 by Café Grumpy in Brooklyn.

Purchased Jan. 21 at Grumpy's Chelsea location, 224 W. 20th St., between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Description: "Dark sweet plum aromatics open into a full-bodied cup. Notes of earthy toasted almond and sugar cane. Pleasant brightness in the finish."

In the Cup: I have to confess something first. I've been drinking less espresso and coffee in general lately, opting for green tea, after reading something or other extolling not only its health benefits but its supposed tendency to deliver a lower, steadier dose of caffeine with fewer peaks and valleys. Ye gads, the coffee blogger has become a tea drinker! But it actually makes me appreciate the coffee more.

Green tea is always the same (in my opinion), and it's an acquired taste, not nearly as pleasant as regular black tea or the various herbal types. But high-end culinary coffees seem to have endless variety. While I lean toward the sweet and nutty varieties, and much prefer a sugary finish, I've come to appreciate what coffee tasters call brightness -- so long as it's not too bright. This coffee had just about the right amount. And I must say, as a bit of a traditionalist, I've never been disappointed by any bean from Brazil. Is this coffee amazing? Did it knock my socks off? I may have grown a little jaded in my coffee quest, so I'd have to say no. But it's certainly delicious, and delivers what the bag says it will.

Also, kudos to Grumpy for including a link to information about the farm, something more coffee Web sites should do. Located in a mountainous region, it has 160 employees and produces on average 720,000 kilograms of beans per year. There's a whole lot of coffee in Brazil.

Grumpy is an old standby by now for me, and of course it's great the little chain is now roasting its own beans, but I'll probably be venturing out again to Stumptown and other venues once the weather gets warmer, and I feel like getting on the bike again. If anyone has any suggestions, fire away.

Welcome, Twitter Users

[Note to new visitors: You may be interested in this post about Twitter: "The Public Editor Joins the Cocktail Party."]

Updated March 13, 2011. Hello, and thanks for visiting my personal blog, which is mostly about coffee, with a little bit about social media and technology.

It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.

My name is Patrick LaForge. I have been an editor at The New York Times since 1997, after a dozen years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in upstate New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. I started using Twitter in early 2007, when Sewell Chan and I created the City Room blog for The Times. In May 2009, I left City Room and the metro desk to become the editor in charge of the copy desks.

How I Use Twitter

I generally post updates about Web content I am reading, watching or thinking about, not what I had for lunch. I follow hundreds of people who use Twitter the same way -- a collection of active linkers, journalists, bloggers, New Yorkers, Times staffers and readers.

You can see what Twitter looks like to me by viewing my Twitterstream list of the 800 or so accounts I follow and read every day. I find it hard to follow more people than that and read every tweet. If you are interested in a high-signal list that is mostly links and retweets, try my list "Linkers", the people I rely on to recommend the latest, best content on Twitter and the Web.

I do not automatically return follows, but if you engage with me and provide interesting content, the odds are I will add you to my twitterstream.

And if you are not among the people I follow directly, but you seem nice enough (and not a spammer or commercial bot), I may add you to the few thousand accounts on The Mighty List, when I get a chance. (For some reason, Twitter allows me to go above the 500-account cap on these lists, and I'm not sure why -- perhaps it's a glitch, or perhaps it's because I was a lists beta-tester or have a verified account.)

If you are relatively new to Twitter, you might be interested in this post, "Basic Twitter Links for Journalists."

About The Times and Twitter

If you have a question about The Times, I will try to answer it, but you may be better off putting the question to the paper's social media editor, Jennifer Preston, her new deputy, Liz Heron, or the public relations team, @NYTimesComm. You can find more Times staffers on Twitter by looking at the staff list at @nytimes on Twitter.

You may have heard that The Times has "banned" the word tweet in its pages. That is not true. We do discourage its overuse and encourage less colloquial language in serious contexts. If you want to read an accurate account, see this post on After Deadline, the style and grammar blog kept by our standards editor, Phil Corbett, or read my comments on Steve Buttry's blog. There's more here, too.

Other Places I Share Links

Only some of the links I share on Twitter come from The Times. If you want to see other links that I am reading, see my Google Reader profile. Sometimes I bookmark articles that are specifically about the future of journalism and media on my Delicious page. And lately I have been fooling around with a Tumblr page. My other Web homes, with varying levels of activity, are listed at the left.

If we are acquaintances or friends, find me on Facebook. Sorry, I don't accept friend requests from people I don't know.

How Do You Use Twitter?

Send me an email, or leave a comment here on the blog. I read them all.

For more of my thoughts on Twitter, blogging and social media, see these other posts. (I don't blog much these days. If I do, it is usually about coffee.)

Or, you can just head back to Twitter. You're probably missing something...

Analyzing an Experiment in Blogging

monthlychart Since October I've been experimenting here with some personal blogging. Why, you might ask, when I already blog at my job? Isn't that a busman's holiday? Perhaps. But I had plunked down money for this domain, and I had some ideas and obsessions to explore that didn't fit in with my work. And I also wanted to conduct a few experiments. When a blog is housed within a major news site, the metrics get hard to sort out. With some great content and breaking news, and a huge built-in audience, it is a simple matter to draw millions of views. (Palafo.com has drawn under 5,000 views in its entire existence, with who knows how many hundreds of those clicks attributable to family and friends.)

Blogging alone is a lot tougher, as some smaller news outlets and out of work journalists may be discovering the hard way. You have to rely on tools found in the wild -- basic search, trackbacks, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Digg, reminding friends at parties that you have a blog, etc.

As it turns out, the free host Wordpress.com offers some pretty good measurement tools on the back end. They won't let me use Google analytics -- how irritating -- but the stats they provide are interesting. (No measurement of time spent, unique users and repeat visitors, or other ways to judge engagement, alas,)

Take a look at the chart up top (click to enlarge it). It shows day to day traffic for the last few weeks. Basically, all you need to know is that the peaks are when I blogged. The valleys show up when I took a break. No content, no readers. Simple enough. Without posts, the traffic dives off a cliff. This is one reason big commercial sites (both mainstream and indie) often blog shotgun style, throwing as much content to the search engines and feed readers and social networks as they can, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Over time, you do get some repeat visitors, but the Web audience is pretty fickle. They come for the content, and they don't care too much who you are.

The peaks and valleys are more obvious in this week to week chart (click to enlarge):

weeklychart

As you can probably guess from this chart, without looking around the blog, my posting dropped off in recent weeks, from about two or three times a week to once a week. Some work projects came to a head, and I found it more rewarding and easier to Twitter in 140 characters for a potentially large audience than research and write complicated posts requiring photos and so forth. So I never did the planned posts about the New York Comic Convention, the trip to the Spa Castle in Queens, and any number of food-oriented posts. (There's something about blogs and food.)

It was particularly labor-intensive because I was mostly writing about podcasts, which required hours of listening to audio, music (ditto), blogging/social media/books (hours of reading and Web surfing) and single-source coffees that required comparison shopping around town.

Before that wore me down I did learn a few things about what drives traffic to a little blog like mine in a far corner of the Web. Let's look at the all-time top posts (click to enlarge):

topposts

The all-time top post was my advice on a computer problem I encountered: how to get rid of annoying IM coho bots. More about that later.

The No. 2 spot is taken by a list post of my favorite blogs. Web readers love lists, and bloggers love to be put on lists. I had not quite realized the significance of automatic trackbacks, but a lot of blogs use them, so when you link to them, they link back to you. Bloggers themselves will pay you a visit to see what you are saying about them. It is still a thriving form of social media.

Then there was my bio. Not surprising. Just about everyone landing here probably looks at it once.

My list of iPhone apps, updated a few times, also proved surprisingly popular. I put it out at a time when people were having a lot of trouble figuring out which apps were worth using, and there were hundreds of new ones. Plenty of other bloggers had the same idea. It helps to be an early adopter. That list is probably getting a little stale now. I've lost interest in tracking down every single cool app, now that I've settled on the set I need.

The biggest overall topic is podcasting. There are many directories but few that approach the topic in a systematic fashion. My approach was entirely idiosyncratic, and I would have stopped if I hadn't discovered a small but interested audience out there. Podcasters, even commercially successful ones, are rather unreliable about posting reliable show notes or blog posts about their content. And as much as I love the iTunes store, the podcasting area is a bit of a disorganized mess, perhaps because the content is mostly free. That leaves a search void.

My coffee blogging also proved "popular" in the aggregate, because it was aimed at obsessives who are served by a network of blogs and sites that have been going out of business in the economic downturn. While many coffee experts have tried to blog, their expertise tends to be in making great coffee, not writing or blogging. There's definitely an opportunity out there for a good writer who loves coffee and knows more about it than I do.

Any blog post about Twitter is bound to be a hit, especially if you mention it on Twitter. I know, having clicked through to a bunch of them. (The Jan. 23 one about my rules for following on Twitter is the high starting peak in the chart at the top of this post.)

The only real surprises on this list were the N+1 post, about a slightly obscure literary magazine with Luddite pretensions, and the "thoughtprints" post, about a very obscure theater production. Neither had a particularly good Web presence, so these posts filled a void in search results, apparently.

On to the top referring sites. The results below (click to enlarge) taught me that I was better off depending on the curiosity of strangers than the kindness of my friends. The numbers don't lie. Twitter, an open, public platform, wins hands-down, over Facebook, a mostly closed platform where only my friends see my stuff.

referrers

Now, something doesn't quite add up here. These stats don't match the larger views listed by the post. But that's often the case with Web metrics. They are suspect.

During this period I had about the same number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends. I promoted links to my blog on both sites -- probably a little more often on Facebook, thinking people who knew me would show more interest in my stuff. Facebook is a closed system, and only my friends can see my profile. Twitter is open and even shows up in search. But Twitter followers far outperformed Facebook friends on click-throughs. Perhaps they prefer to stay on Facebook, chat and look at each others' pictures. Twitter users seem to be more actively seeking out content.

The biggest surprise may be that Mahalo referral, which keeps on giving. I posted an answer on Mahalo about how to get rid of the instant-message coho bots, with a link to my longer blog post about it. Not only did that answer drive a lot of traffic, but a link to my post has been posted on numerous other blogs. Happy to help.

The rest of the referrers are an assortment of individual Wordpress tags, people clicking links in email, Google reader RSS shares, stumbleupon links, and so forth.

Now, what about search? It doesn't seem to have driven a lot of traffic (click to enlarge):

searchterms

Not surprisingly, many lazy people just type the name of the blog in the search panel rather than bookmarking the site. I do the same thing. The top searched term on Google has been "Yahoo" for many years. This is one reason I picked a short, unusual name for my blog that (I hope) is easy to remember. The other terms are assorted podcast, coffee and blog topics that I briefly mentioned, including the unusual phrase "janky vegetables" from the "Faire du Camping" episode of You Look Nice Today, which is not janky at all.

Most of the few incoming links were trackbacks from posts or blogs I mentioned, and stuff related to the instant-message coho problem.

Now, of course, it is a truism on the Internet that if you send people away with links, they will come back. Where did this blog send people?

clicks

Click to enlarge the chart. The greatest beneficiary here is my own Twitter profile, followed by my Facebook profile.

The other links are mostly blogs from my list, podcast sites from the reviews, and assorted links that have appeared in the feeds at the left of the blog. (Wordpress makes it very easy to share links and feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Google Reader and so forth, without having to manually post anything here on the blog.)

The most interesting result had nothing to do with traffic here on the blog. I started posting a lot on Twitter in part to promote this blog, as well as share other links I found while looking for stuff to write about on the blog. Then people started following me there, I became part of a community, and I ended up with a bigger, more reliable audience there than here. Click on this Twittercounter chart, for the last three months:

twitcount

That's remarkable. I'll be thinking about Twitter some more and eventually share thoughts here on the blog that require more than 140 characters. I could obviously use the traffic. :)

updateUpdate: After two blog posts, four hours and some promotion on Facebook and Twitter the chart was happily spiking again (at right). Most of the clicks came from Twitter, followed by Facebook, Google Reader and assorted tags here on Wordpress blogs. Plus one click from Mahalo Answers to the IM coho post.

Podcast Zeitgeist, Jan. 19

Welcome to the Podcast Zeitgeist list: presented in apparently random order, at inconsistent intervals, its purpose obscure, its usefulness in doubt, its taste questionable, its methods and motives suspect. [See all lists.]

  • This Week in Tech 177: There's a Little Shatner in All of Us and 178: Call of Doody. I'm catching up here with two episodes. A special guest on the first of these was Star Trek's Geordi LaForge (Levar Burton). Burton held his own as a geek on a panel with Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Ryan Block, and Lisa Bettany. A lot of talk about TVs. (Block: "Plasma TVs are on the way out.") Reviews of the "disappointing" MacWorld Expo and the Consumer Electronics Show. Whether the Palm Pre phone can save Palm (Dvorak: "They're done.") They end with the prospects for another Star Trek movie and a discussion of Geordi's visor. The latest episode, recorded Sunday night, devotes 20 minutes to the news that Steve Jobs is taking a temporary leave from Apple for health reasons, with a focus on news coverage, from Ron Goldman of CNBC to this profanity-laden Gizmodo post. Dvorak predicts that Apple will go into decline in two years. This is followed bya discussion of the Downadup/Conficker worm that infected 9 million Windows computers in four days (download the security updates, people). Laporte is wiggy on this episode ("Conficker? I hardly knew her!"), perhaps because he and panelist Tom Merritt attended a concert the night before by the geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton and the improv duo Paul & Storm. (The "doody" in the podcast title refers to panelist Patrick Norton, who has to change his son's diaper during the show and never returns.) The liquidation of Circuit City. A discussion of digital TV up-converters (Dvorak recommends a model.) Laporte recommends an audiobook: "Predictably Irrational." United Kingdom porn filters are blocking Wikipedia and the Wayback Machine. Are Are Google layoffs and the killing of <a href="">features like Jaiku and Dodgeball a sign of a market bottom? The episode ends with a clip of Coulton's "Mandelbrot Set." Running times: Both 1 hour 20 minutes, give or take a minute. Released: Jan. 11 and 18.

  • MacBreak Weekly 123: The Great London Fire The title is a metaphor from panelist Andy Ihnato. Laporte is also joined by Alex Lindsay. The three agree that MacWorld Expo turnout was low, and the show lacked drama. Could Apple's decision to pull out of the convention anger fans and hurt the company? Can MacWorld survive? David Pogue will give next year's keynote. Ihnatko on what organizer IDG should do: "They should treat this like the Great London Fire.It's not the result that one would have wanted, but when you wipe the slate clean, you get to rebuild this city in the world that exists today... If you were to build a really big conference today, you wouldn't do it like a 1985 trade show." Focus on public areas and community. In another blow, CES is looking to have an Apple-centric area. The big announcement at MacWorld, it turns out, was the end of DRM at the iTunes store, but Leo points out a big drawback to the 30-cent upgrade offer: You have to upgrade ALL your songs, even the lame ones you don't like anymore. Discussion of the iPhone and the Palm Pre. There's agreement that no company will dominate the cellphone market. Politicians switching to Mac: the latest, Mike Huckabee. Hacking PC Netbooks to run Mac OS (in violation of the Mac user agreement, it should be noted). BoingBoing has a chart. Apple seems to be (cracking down, apparently irked by a how-to video on Wired Gadget Lab. Leo mentions that the MacWorld Expo swag bag for presenters included $1,800 worth of gifts. They end with some a robust list of weekly picks. Laporte suggests this external battery solution for iPhone. I'm happy with the APC universal, which doesn't have be attached directly to the phone (it charges iPods and other devices too). Lindsay picks the rubber-covered Rugged LaCie portable hard drive, which I also use, for music. It's versatile, carries a lot of data and takes a pounding. The panel also reviews some portable document scanners. And there is a zen moment from Lindsay, talking about how multiple users burn out Firewire ports: "Computers tend to like to have monogamous relationships. You have a lot of people using them, they tend to fall apart." Running TIme: 1 hour, 10 minutes. Released: Jan. 13
  • "This Week in Media 122: Planned Viewerhood" This week, an interesting discussion about how digital video recorders, video on the Web and similar technology are changing how we watch. Watching a series all at once. Watching sports after the game is over, with fake suspense. No more competing for specific time slots. The viewer chooses. This is all good, but I offer three numbers to consider, the totals in my iTunes podcast subscriptions window: 463 items, 15.8 days, 19.32 gigabytes. That's not counting the regular shows stacked up on the TiVo, and the movies in my Netflix queue. Giving me control over content might mean I never get around to actually consuming it. Another topic: Should online video have closed-captioning for the hearing impaired? Speculation that Apple pulling out of MacWorld was the result of a Steve Jobs tantrum. More MacWorld/CES stuff. I feel like I'm hearing the same conversations over and over on these tech podcasts. May have to cut back. Running time: 58:47 minutes. Released: Jan. 13.

  • The Dinner Party Download, Episode 14 I'm glad these guys are back. The concept: Win your next dinner party. The Icebreaker is another animals-in-a-bar joke. Small talk: President-elect Obama's old car is on eBay, a Chrysler. Burger King PR stunt: Drop 10 Facebook friends, get a free burger. A Sundance-nominated history lesson with booze. Dr. James Bedford is super-cool. He was the first person to be frozen after death. The cocktail is "Death on the Rocks": Champagne, absinthe and ice cubs of fresh blood orange juice. The interview is Lamont Mozier, the Motown songwriter; don't ask him which was his favorite song. The food segment is about Kogi Korean barbecue tacos. It is sold off a truck that broadcasts its location on its blog and on Twitter. Outro song is A.C. Newman's "There Are Maybe 10 or 12..." A big sound, but interesting. Running time: 15:49 minutes. Released: Jan. 16.
  • Christian Comedy Podcast: January Week One With more than 160,00 subscribers, the host Mike Williams says, this is the most-listened-to Christian comedy podcast on iTunes. He starts with a squeaky-voiced imitation of that annoying YouTube kid FredThen we hear a few jokes from the "Stephen Wright of Christian comedy," Pastor Tim Jones, with his "weird mental mind." For example: "Remember, if you're standing next to Dracula in a group photo and you try to give him bunny ears, when the film develops it will just look like you're giving the peace sign... I asked her if she was a model and she smiled, thinking it was because of her beauty. But it was actually because she smelled like plastic and glue." I kind of like that one. There's a comedy song about a fiancee with a bad attitude from the new CD by the duo Bean and Bailey: "Who peed in your cheerios? Only heaven knows... Who got your panties in such a wad?" Ahem. You can fast-forward through the hunting bow ads in the middle. Robert G. Lee, a comedy writer for the kid show "Veggie Tales." tells jokes about rasising kids. For example: "If the Apostle Paul had had teenagers, Christianity would have been nipped in the bud! 'We're going to Corinth again? ...Everywhere you go, you're beaten, you're robbed, you're stoned. Do you have any idea embarrassing that is? Why don't you just write these people?' 'That's not a bad idea, young lady.'" Running time: 17:59 minutes. Released: Jan. 4.
  • Geek Loves Nerd: Teaching Gratefulness James is the geek. Jenn is the nerd. They're married. Their podcast took a holiday hiatus, but now it's back. He also does the Nobody's Listening Podcast, billed as "a clean comedy podcast." He has grown a beard. She thinks it is attractive but the beard sticks in her face when they kiss. They did nine minutes on the beard. Then I started skipping ahead. There was a lengthy discussion about their 11-month-old, their second. I had to bail, and never did hear how to teach a child gratefulness, an important topic. These seem like very nice people. I am not interested in listening to them on a regular basis. This is, no doubt, my own character flaw. Running time: 53:35 minutes. Released: Jan. 9.

  • Uhh Yeah Dude, Episode 149 This is not a clean comedy podcast. This is the pee in the Cheerios. It grows increasingly impossible to summarize what Jonathan Larroquette and Seth Romatelli are up to here. There are the usual offbeat topics -- lame celebrities at liveautographs.com (Hulk Hogan, Danica Patrick), that Amish heater infomercial, the drunk woman who called 911 on herself, some tots in trouble, an F.B.I. warning about cybergeddon, and a promising ABC hidden-camera show that outs racists, a belated appreciation for George Carlin and disgust with Adam Sandler. But the highlights are the personal rants and anecdotes: Seth about his experiences waiting in a line for a $14 juice, and several items from Jonathan: women who go out with jerks, a true story of martial arts justice from his school days, and a weird encounter in a guitar store. The promised "Uhh Yeah Dude" Web site is not yet online. Length: 1 hour, 11 minutes. Released: Jan. 13, 2009.
  • Smodcast: Smod Bless Us Everyone (70), Way of the Master (71), Hello Dere! (72). So, now that their movie has tanked, the director Kevin Smith and producer Scott Mosier are suddenly back with several episodes of this explicit humor podcast. In the first one they riff on Christmas and how people have trouble remembering their movies. "Making moves only seen in Belize." In "Way of the Master," they discuss the sexual possibilities and risks of staying abroad in youth hostels. The title refers to Kirk Cameron's Christian evangelical Web site, "The Way of the Master," which has a test of how good a person you are. Kevin and Scott take the test, and the discussion gets mighty dark. They also brainstorm a science fiction, the "slaptrack," in which everyone has the godlike power -- once -- to banish another person from this reality. And it's pretty weird. For the most recent, third episode, Mosier is traveling in Vietnam, so Smith is joined by another pal, and they spend a lot of time ragging on a third friend who isn't there and talking about breasts. As always, I enjoy the background soundtrack that is added post-production. I skipped two earlier episodes that were basically the DVD discussion tracks for the film, which I haven't seen yet. Running times: 52 minutes to 1 hour, 5 minutes; released Dec. 24, Jan. 9 and Jan. 16.
  • The Futile Podcast: "It Worked in Cuffs," "It Became Cobra," "It was an Academy Award winning training montage" I'm catching up on this action-movie discussion podcast. First up, "The Spirit." I've been a longtime collector of Will Eisner and his art, and I've been a Spirit fan since I was a kid reading the Warren reprints in the 70s. I've been looking ahead to this movie with dread and anticipation. Now I may just wait for the video. It doesn't sound like the film did a good job capturing Eisner's gloomy comedic world, or perhaps that world just doesn't translate to the screen. The podcasters compare it to the Tim Burton "Batman," "House of Games," and "Rocky and Bullwinkle." A bad trip. "This movie was just strange." Tonal inconsistency and acting problems. There's consensus that the movie failed to pull off breaking of the fourth wall, which they say "worked in 'Kuffs." (I'm pretty sure Eisner invented that technique in comics back in the 40s, but it was a technique he used sparingly.) The futile podcasters digress into a long discussion of sex roles, which was entertaining. The next, short episode is billed as a review of "Beverly Hills Cop," but is mostly a discussion of comedians with a quick recap of Eddie Murphy's career. The third of these podcasts is about Scorsese's "Color of Money," which I probably can't bear to watch again because of Tom Cruise, though this discussion reminded me it wasn't bad. And it made me want to watch "The Hustler" again. Running times: 31 minutes, 11 minutes and 33 minutes. Released: Jan. 4, 8 and 11.
  • The 40-Year-Old Boy: Episode 43. I dropped into this podcast cold, and perhaps earlier episodes wehre better. The Chicago comedian Mike Schmidt (now in L.A.) talks about ... stuff .. while his producer laughs in the background. (She's like a laugh track. I started to suspect she was a recording.) His Web site explains: "While friends his age are taking care of their kids, it’s all Mike can do just to take care of himself. Come listen to the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of a modern day Peter Pan: awkward, angry…basically, the kind of guy who would punch you in the face for referring to him as a 'modern day Peter Pan.'" In this episode, Schmidt says he used to weigh "500 pounds" and he got stomach surgery to fix it. He describes some medical particulars in excruciating detail then he tells how he got around the limitations of his surgically altered stomach and gained the weight back. The outro song, "Don't Give Up," by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, lays it on thick and underscores how sad this story is. Great song, though. Running time: 1 hour, 17 minutes. Released: Jan. 14.

    • Podcast Zeitgeist, Jan. 10

    The list this week is tech-heavy and later than usual, mainly because of the "last" MacWorld Expo. {See all lists].

    • MacBreak Weekly 122: Macworld Expo Live from the floor at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Leo Laporte gathered some of his stalwarts, following the last Apple keynote (the company is pulling out of the convention, a fact that seemed to hang over this event with sadness). The discussion focuses on the high points of the keynote presentation from Phil Schiller of Apple: improvements to iMovie editing; new iPhoto features like facial recognition, geo-tagging, and integration with Flickr; the new 17-inch MacBook Pro; and the end of DRM on iTunes. General agreement that Schiller is no Steve Jobs when it comes to giving a speech. Many of the panelists are camera geeks who don't use iPhoto, so they are hoping that some of the features will be ported to Aperture, Apple's high-end photo software. No real picks, though Boxee was plugged; some good show notes are here. I also watched a short 5-minute MacBreak video podcast featuring Merlin Mann pestering people on the convention floor. It was amusing with low information content. Length: 1 hour 9 minutes. Released: Jan. 6.

    • Mac OS Ken: 01.07.2009, 01.08.2009, 01.08.2009 Ken Ray puts out brief roundups of Mac news six days a week. I used to listen to him every morning, but then it got to be just too much information. Still, he does a great job, so I checked back in for his MacWorld coverage. The first episode this week started out with listener predictions for keynote announcements and fan voicemails, then covered the basics from Phil Schiller's presentation of iPhoto, iMovie and so forth. He seems a tad disappointed at the shortage of new hardware this year from Apple. Thursday's episode featured a conversation with Glen Roberts, product manager for HP Media Smart Server, and about how the high-end product was getting by in a struggling economy. It uses Windows home server, so you need a network with both Macs and PCs, but it is Mac-friendly. Ken talks fast and transmits a lot of data, and he's promising more interviews from the show. He admits to be wiped out and jetlagged. Interestingly, he provides better insights and sounds more awake on the rival MacCast (see below). The final episode featured interviews with Microsoft's Mac Business Unit and the CEO of MarketCircle and listeners' voicemail reactions to the Schiller keynote. Many are not happy with Apple pulling the plug on its Expo participation. Length: Ranged from 10 to 20 minutes. Released: Jan. 7, 8, 9.
    • The Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gab 185: Live From the Macworld Expo Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun thought Schiller did a good job with the keynote. They note the auditorium was not full, as it always was for Steve Jobs. An extensive discussion of the technical challenges of covering past keynotes, followed by extensive discussion of how they live-blogged this one. There are several technical interruptions. They get down to business chewing over the same few morsels as other podcasters. Some gripes about the new battery in the 17-inch MacBook, which is not replaceable. They point out that in introducing Tony Bennett, Schiller made a bit of a gaffe, calling the show the "last Macworld Expo." Of course while Apple won't be there next year, the hall is booked. This is a bit of a meandering show with a lot of geeky digressions, but that seems to be part of its charm, as well as the reason I am not a regular listener. Length: 53:38 minutes. Released: Jan 7.
    • The MacCast: Macworld 2009 Keynote Wrapup Adam Christianson discusses his impressions from sitting in the audience at Schiller's keynote. He is joined by his fellow podcasters Victor Cajiao (Typical Mac User) and Ken Ray (Mac OS Ken). Ken points out that Schiller made a point that 3.4 million users per week visit Apple stores, which is 100 times the number of people that the company used to reach at MacWorld Expo. "It was kind of harsh... It wasn't even subtext. It was text: 'We don't need this.'" Victor: "It was hurtful." Adam hopes Macworld continues as a community event in future years. They still give his performance high marks. Face recognition in iPhoto "kind of creepy." Cool aspects of geocoding for sorting. This podcast also has the best explanation of the value of the 99-cent Keynote iphone app. Ken thinks the charge is weird. More complaints about the MacBook battery. Compared to the other Macworld podcasts, this was the clearest and most thorough, and also the calmest, perhaps because it was recorded in a quieter location. Length: 1:32:42 Released: Jan. 7.
    • Typical Mac User Podcast: Macworld Expo Post Keynote Wrapup Victor Cajaio's podcast. I was dreading the thought of listening to another hour and a half discussion of Phil Schiller's presentation, so I was happy to discover that it was identical to the Maccast above. Length: 1:28:35. Released: Jan. 6.
    • This Week in Tech 176: Fat in the MiddleLate in the week, I finally got around to this one, which was recorded before Macworld and the CES consumer technology show, which started on Thursday in Las Vegas, presenting technology fans with a choice. Leo Laporte is joined by John C. Dvorak, Robert Scoble, and the Houston Chronicle tech reporter Dwight Silverman (who said he was skipping Macworld for CES). Laporte blames Twitter and social media for celebrity nerd feuds. They give their predictions, which were mostly on the mark (17-inch MacBook and its non-replaceable battery had both leaked, but the iTunes DRM decision had not). They were rightly skeptical of iPhone Nano rumors. Some discussion of 3D TVs: still too blurry. The value of location-aware laptops.The new Palm Phone and the "fat middle." (Seems like a tough fight ahead for Palm.) On the PC side, discussion of the Windows 7 beta and dead Zune day. At the conferences: The weirdness of being covered by an audience of live-bloggers, heads down, clicking away. Why bother going? It's better to watch the game on TV. They end with an interesting and alarming discussion of remote law enforcement hacking of home computers in England, without a warrant. This somehow segues into Dvorak comparing treatment of Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff. All entertaining. Length: A manageable 1 hour, 8 minutes. Released: Jan. 4.
    • Net@Night: Fly the Friendly Skies Yes, more from Laporte. He's the undisputed tech-podcast king. This one is a sometimes overlooked gem, featuring Laporte and Amber MacArthur talking about cool sites, viral media and online happenings. A previous episode's interview with Mr. Tweet inspired me to ramp up my twittering (both reading and posting). Robert Scoble was on last week talking about microblogging and the real-time Web. This week, Laporte talks briefly about his Macworld presentation about the crumbling mass media monopoly (not available online). Other topics included layoffs at Livejournal, Facebook Connect, the simple hack and security flaw that upended Twitter on Monday (compromising the accounts of Laporte, Barack Obama, Fox News and others). Tip: Don't use dictionary words for passwords, especially if you're an administrator on a network. The hour also features good discussions and explanations of Blip.FM, a sort of social networking music playlist service, and the indie-music sharing service Amaze.Fm. A brief chat with MrCalzone, developer of the Google slapper gog.is (just type http://gog.is/KEYWORD.KEYWORD where each KEYWORD separated by points represents the search terms the person asking you for information should have Googled). Leo notes that he Friend-ed too many people on Facebook and has no room for his actual friends and family members now joining. (Leo, you can drop me.) The viral video of the week is the Onion's overexposed and only kind of funny spoof video (The MacBook Wheel) and an interview with Micah Mazier, host of the podcast of the week, Lucas County Choppers, featuring four air traffic controllers and their motorcycles. Length: 1 hour, 1 minute. Released: Jan 7.
    • This Week in Media 120: Cotton, Salt and a Bubble Machine and 121: The Good, the Ad and the Ugly More enjoyable new media discussions from a panel led by Daisy Whitney. I'm catching up here. The first of these episodes included a discussion of the Kindle and e-books, YouTube battles and Hulu, and the greatest nude scenes in movies, and it felt a bit like holiday filler. This week's episode is more informative, with a discussion of some recent smart moves by Netflix, part of a trend that ought to worry cable companies. Semantic distinctions matter: Netflix uses the term viewers understand -- "movie rental" -- instead of "pay per view." The Time Warner-Viacom battle. A discussion of iPhone applications, including the translator that was co-host Alex Lindsay's pick last week on MacBreak Weekly. The panel also discusses what works best for a podcast: a strict format or a loose conversation. Consensus: It depends on the target audience, and the host. Does it make sense for a small business like a dry cleaner to have a podcast? Some on the panel think it could work, with the right creative concept. Lindsay: "If it is not seen as something that is impartial, or somewhat impartial, no one will listen..." He's right. Lengths: 56 minutes; and 1 hour, 4 minutes. Released: Dec. 30 and Jan. 6.
    • Uhh Yeah Dude, Episode 148 After all that tech talk, I needed a break. In their explicit comedy podcast, Jonathan Larroquette and Seth Romatelli riff this week on dumb laws, cocaine-loving bees, the hazards of third-hand smoke. idiots who shoot guns in the air on New Year's Eve, the world's stupidest bank robber, the Jan. 16 opening of the Notorious B.I.G. biopic and the movie "Mall Cop,," a drunk woman who hit on Jonathan on Christmas Eve, truck antlers, and the oldest person in the world, Gertrude Baines, 114, who lives around the corner. Way back in Episode 112 in April 2008, they described a visit to her at a nearby nursing home, when she was merely the third-oldest person in the world. She outlasted the competition. Seth: "We totally like lamped at her place... and we have pictures to prove this." Length: 1 hour, 15 minutes. Released: Jan. 6.

    15 Blogs on My Current Reading List

    I subscribe to the feeds of hundreds of blogs through Google Reader (see shared links to some of them at left), but the list of blogs I actually enjoy reading is short. I'm always looking for additions to that list, and here are some strong contenders, in alphabetical order:

  • Cognitive Daily The "daily" part seems to be a misnomer, but the topics are always fun and interesting. How many tabs do you have open on your browser? Caffeine, memory and the brain. Is it sexist to think men are angrier than women? Another blog from the same site is The Frontal Cortex, also in the same vein and infrequently updated; the author was featured in last Sunday's NYT Magazine.
  • Consumerist This is was one of the best blogs in the Gawker Media empire (sold to Consumer Reports on 12/30). And it's only gotten better since the start of the Great Depression II, despite some staff cuts. Frugal tips from America's cheapest family. Customer call center horror stories. Crowd-sourcing rumors like the Wal-Mart iPhone. Abuses by the credit-card industry. How to write complaint letters to consumer-abusing corporations.
  • The Daily Beast Tina Brown's ripoff of The Huffington Post is better-written, better-designed, better edited and more provocative than the original. Brown attracts big-name talent, and there's a coherent editing philosophy (unlike the endless stream of often-predictable blah-blah at HuffPo -- 250+ items on Friday alone! More than 60 already today! I need an assistant to read it). The Beast is attractive and well-organized with some cute ideas. Too bad it launched on the eve of the Great Depression II. Just don't try to turn it into a magazine. I've canceled most of mine.

  • Dlisted and Last Night's Party My friend Louis, who is in the financial industry, recommended these. They seem to be for people who think Gawker and TMZ are too high-brow.
  • David Byrne Journal The personal observations of the former Talking Heads frontman. Updated at an erratic pace, and hard to pin down. Sometimes he posts about riding his bike around New York (I see him all the time). Sometimes he writes about about music and touring. Sometimes about art. Then there's this post about the newspaper business. David Byrne is the only cool celebrity. His secret? He remains a genuine human being.
  • Fail Blog The Web cliché comes alive. Bad math. Fail! More bad math. Fail! Video of an exploding VCR. Fail! Trying to look cool with naked guy behind you. Fail! Bad parking job. Fail! Etc.
  • kung fu grippe The personal Web log of Merlin Mann a k a @hotdogsladies on Twitter, frequent MacBreak Weekly podcast guest, and the mad genius behind the You Look Nice Today podcast. The title is a G.I. Joe reference, I'm pretty sure. Quotes and videos mostly. He is also behind the brilliant 5ives list blog, which has not been updated since August, but is funny as hell. And, of course, 43 Folders, get organized, blah blah blah.
  • Mashable Incredible amounts of practical information about apps, tech, social media, the Web, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, the iPhone, and the like. Sometimes too promotional but always enjoyable. Many many lists: 5 Reasons to Install Google Desktop Today, Twitter Lawsuits: 4 Reasons Your Tweets Might Be Trouble, The Year in Tweets: The 10 Most Memorable Twitter Moments of 2008, Career Toolbox: 100 Places to Find Jobs, and the 24 Most Underrated Web Sites of 2008.
  • The Official Google Blog. Because you have to know what they're thinking about over there.
  • Pinakothek A blog about pictures by the writer Luc Sante a k a The All Seeing Eye Jr. Updated irregularly, but each post is a polished gem, like "The Poetry of Ellery Queen" and "Debraining." Then there is this wonderful paragraph.
  • Portfolio's Mixed Media I don't read Portfolio the magazine. Is it still published? But I like its media blog. It's smart. It's sassy. It's a good guide to reports of the media meltdown, real and rumored. And possibly doomed. (Just a rumor!) Enjoy it while you can.
  • ScienceDaily Science is fun. And sometimes a little weird. Pain hurts more if the person hurting you means it. First U.S. patient gets face transplant. Whispering bats are shrieking 100 times louder than previously thought. Thanks, science!
  • Scobleizer Oh, Robert Scoble. So egocentric, so insane. Look at Scoble! Look at Scoble! But I do love his blog. And his multiple Twitter accounts. And his Friendfeed. Powerful critiques of blog comments. Deep thoughts about Twitter. And Friendfeed. And Facebook. And so forth. Fall into the Scoble vortex.
  • This Recording I'm not entirely sure what it is, or what it is trying to do, but I came across this while writing this post about N+1, and I like it. And in the end, that is all I ask from a blog. Recent posts: an appreciation of John Lindsay, working as a medical test subject, an essay on tattoos by somebody who does not care for them much (me neither -- nothing personal!), and something by Emily Gould.

    • Have a suggestion for a blog to follow? Add it in the comments. Thanks.

    'Old' Media, 'New' Media, on Twitter

    I jumped into an esoteric debate Wednesday evening: What is the most effective way mainstream media can use social media like Twitter? Should they never post RSS feeds automatically? Must every tweet be crafted by human hands? Notice that I don't say "old media," because I happen to think that term is bull. Plenty of supposedly "old media" outlets have been on the Web since the earliest days and produce innovative multimedia content that is as good as or better than anything found elsewhere in the "new media." But that doesn't make for a good story. (Yes, plenty of old media practitioners still have their heads in the sand. And I don't claim to have figured it all out -- my point is, nobody has figured it out. The Web is 20 minutes old. Nobody knows anything.)

    Anyway, the first thing I re-learned was how hard it is to have an extended discussion on Twitter. My Tweets are in one place, under my updates. The other person's replies are somewhere else, and I can't even link to them easily on Twitter. I have to use this search tool. Messages are limited to 140 characters. We're surrounded by a cloud of unrelated tweets by others, in varying degrees of engagement, who also might get annoyed if you're posting every 30 seconds. There is no threading, and Twitter lacks other tools we expect in messaging/commenting software. (Direct messages on Twitter are even worse, as Robert Scoble notes.)

    So for the sake of preserving this record, here's the discussion I had with somebody Twittering for the MediaTricks blog about media organizations that put up RSS feeds using services like Twitterfeed.

    NYT is a culprit, with many automatic headline feeds, including one for the City Room blog, where humans also tweet sometimes. I follow MediaTricks on Twitter (they return the favor), and butted into a conversation about Twitterfeed. I have, with some labor, turned the tweets into a conversation:

    [@mediatricks to] @baltimoresun: Congrats on turning off Twitterfeed. Thanks for the mention, too. Turning it off has been a winning formula for media so far.

    [@palafo (me)] to @mediatricks: What's the argument against using Twitterfeed?

    @mediatricks This is our argument: [MediaTricks blog link] Twitter is not a push medium. On Twitter, do you prefer following RSS over following people?

    @palafo I follow both RSS and people on Twitter. I find it useful to have them in the same place. No need for rules; market decides.

    @mediatricks Not rules, just advice based on our experience. We think media misses out on the "social" part of social media w/RSS via Twitter.

    @palafo Really? Then why do 14,000-plus people follow CNN and NYT rss feeds? They're getting something out of it.

    @mediatricks Check out @news8Austin or @kvue (RSS) vs. @kxan_news (human) to see apples-to-apples. Same market, same size operations.

    @palafo Will do. I have posted a longer comment on your post, because Twitter is simply not a useful tool for an extended chat.

    @mediatricks Followers are not getting social interaction still. People follow them b/c they're large & established. They're the exceptions.

    @palafo Hm. It's not just media. There are power Twitter users who get personal but follow few people themselves. It's not that social.

    It's possible there was some cross-talk here. The conversation continued over on the Old Media New Tricks blog. (The comments there are in reverse-chronological order, yet threaded, which I find a little jarring, personally.)

    Here's my take. As I mentioned in my tweets, I use my personal Twitter account to talk to real people and to follow RSS feeds of selected news organizations and blogs. It is handy to have them all in one place.

    Patrick LaForge: Twitter is too young for its users to start making up rules on how it should be used. Nobody knows until different approaches are tried. Let the market decide. CNN has about 14,000 followers for its feed. Someone gets value from that. Nobody's making them follow. Likewise, NYT has a variety of feeds for its sections and blogs that people follow, or don't. There are also many individuals who work there who have personal Twitter accounts (like me) who dive into the social interaction.

    What I prefer is truth in labeling. If you are an individual on Twitter, use an individual's name or handle, and we can chat. Don't call yourself "IndyStar" or "MediaTricks." I expect an institutional name like that to be an RSS feed with only occasional human updates, and I don't really want it pestering me for feedback or crowdsourcing or sharing the views of an unnamed person who is paid to "keep it real" under the outlet's name.

    Twitter is still a very small audience, not worth a lot of staffing resources for a large media organizaiton. It is also a flawed tool. No threading, poor archiving, inadequate search. I am posting on your blog because 140 characters was simply too limiting and bound to get lost in the flood of Tweets, not from RSS feeds, which are predictable, but from the umpteenth individual telling me what's for dinner tonight. (Don't get me wrong, I do get a kick out of that stuff.)

    Robert Quigley: Thanks, Patrick, for the comment. I our defense of @mediatricks, our real names are listed in the bio. There's no hiding our identities.

    We have found Twitter to be worth staffing, despite its flaws. It doesn't take that much to staff, and the feedback we've received is overwhelmingly positive.

    You're right - the market can decide. I personally unfollowed @NYTimes (despite loving the paper) because it's an RSS feed, which I get from Google Reader. People can unfollow our account because they WANT an RSS feed. It's just our experience that people prefer a human-staffed account, therefore it's our advice. The NYT, WSJ, CNN are exceptions because they're mammoth national outlets.

    You may call social interaction "pestering," but our followers (of @statesman and @ColonelTribune) haven't complained. Check out some the feedback from @statesman's followers. It's as much about brand-building (or more) than it is about getting people to click our links.

    Twitter is still a small audience, but it is a social media tool. I don't think anyone doubts that. If your paper is going to use social media (Twitter or elsewhere), our advice (just our advice, not a rule) is to use it for *social* media.

    Patrick LaForge: ... I don't think Twitter is all that social. Even the individuals on it are broadcasting their likes/dislikes, links, blog posts, what they had for dinner. There's a little back and forth but not a lot of tolerance for an ongoing conversation. It's not that social. There are big names on Twitter who are definitely humans posting, but they only follow a few people and have very little social interaction. The tool itself creates this asynchronous community, with very little to encourage more than passing interaction. It's not THAT social.

    Quigley: Sure, it is what you want it to be. We happen to get quite a bit of useful social interaction out of it (beyond what you're eating). It has its limitations, but we don't think it should be dismissed because of them. And news organizations CAN benefit from that social exchange.

    LaForge: Individuals within a news organization can benefit. I really don't see any value in WKRP pretending to Twitter like a live person. Because the examples you've sent me just look like a slightly more sophisticated version of a feed, maintained by a low level producer or assistant. It would be better for the on-air personalities and reporters to all get their own Twitter accounts and be themselves. And keep a feed out there, why not. That's my advice, based on my experience.

    The only thing I would add here is that many people have no idea what Twitter is. Compared to Facebook or blogs or plain old Web sites, it is a niche Internet service with a small number of users. Even fewer people could tell you what an RSS feed is. So this debate is really esoteric nerdstuff.

    There are other comments worth reading over there, probably more enlightening than my own unedited ramblings. I commend them to you, and the ether. Some day someone will make sense of it all, I'm sure. And someone else will pop up to disagree, in 140 characters or less, in a streaming video blast from his or her Mark V brain plug.

    Jeff Jarvis Asks, What Would Google Do?

    img_0440I recently skimmed a galley proof of "What Would Google Do?" by Jeff Jarvis. The book, available from HarperCollins in January, is structured as a series of rules or aphorisms about how Google does business, with some anecdotes from Jarvis about things he has observed in his groundbreaking work as a blogger and media consultant. The book reads like an expanded version of a PowerPoint presentation on the conventional wisdom of Web 2.0. Transparency. Learning from your customers. Simplicity in design. Always being in beta. The importance of links and search engine optimization. The information wants to be free business model. The let-it-all-hang-out-in-public lifestyle of Twitter and Facebook and blogs. (Jarvis gave an overview of his thesis in the Guardian on Monday.) None of this will sound new to anyone paying attention to the Web in 2008. But for those who feel like the digital world is quickly leaving them behind, or who regard the new trends and tools with bafflement, Jarvis's book will be a good tutorial, even if some of the lines sound like Tom Peters-style excellence-speak ("Your worst customer is your best friend"), or call to mind burning Vietnamese villages ("we have to kill books to save them").

    Jarvis offers a lot of Google-style advice for traditional media and other businesses facing a paradigm shift. His point in the section on books is that authors and publishers should turn their works into living texts online, as he promises to do with W.W.G.D. on his blog Buzzmachine. Smart plan. Books in this genre have a short shelf life, often measured in months not years.

    Coffee, Dinner, Love and the Twitter Mind

    Kottke outlines the premise:

    Twitter is fast becoming the real-time zeitgeist of the web hive mind. (Sorry, I don't know what that means either.) Anyway, I've been playing around with Twist, which tracks trends on Twitter and graphs the results. Two of the most interesting trends I've found are:

    drunk, hangover - The drunk talk spikes on Friday and Saturday nights, followed by hangover talk on the following mornings. There's a similar correlation on Facebook.

    monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, saturday, sunday - This one is really interesting. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday get many more mentions than the three other days of the week, which shows the importance of the weekend in contemporary society. Wednesday is the low point, which turns the graph into a representation of hump day, only inverted.

    O.K, so here are some that I tried: Breakfast vs. Lunch vs. Dinner

    Dinner starts out strong, gets overtaken by lunch as the week goes on, then resurges. Breakfast starts out strong at the start of the week then later dwindles away in mentions on Twitter.

    Coffee vs. Tea

    Big spikes for coffee breaks while the tea drinkers sip, sip, sip.

    Obama vs. McCain

    Liberal Internet bias.

    Guns vs. Bible

    I have no idea what it means.

    NYT vs. WSJ

    No comment.

    Plane vs. Train

    Staying on the ground.

    Mac vs. PC

    Twitter is full of Mac fanboys.

    Yes vs. No

    Why so negative, Twitter?

    Peace vs. War

    All we are saying...

    Love vs. Money

    A heartwarming result. There's hope for us yet.