'What Is This Thing Called the Web?'

Fifteen years ago today, on Jan. 22, 1996, The New York Times -- which already had a news service behind a paywall on AOL -- started its free Web site, jolting newspaper publishers and editors across the land to follow suit. A happy birthday tweet prompted me to go on a memory-jogging journey with the Wayback Machine looking for another newspaper site born that month. Back then, I was working for The York Daily Record in southcentral Pennsylvania. The existential headline on this blog post is from an article I wrote for that paper in December 1995, part of a five-day series explaining the Internet. (I had been a computer dabbler since I was a teenager.) The article is reprinted below, with permission (My favorite line: "Some people believe the Web or some future souped-up version of it will transform society. Others think the accent in 'hypertext' should be on 'hype.'") The series was later archived on the paper's rudimentary Web site (logo at above left), a precursor to the now-thriving YDR.com. That site was pushed into the world a bit early, thanks to some bad weather. Design of the York Digital Record had been proceeding with slow deliberation around the time the series was written. Then, on Jan. 9, 1996, a blizzard paralyzed the region, and The Daily Record couldn't deliver papers (the state ordered all vehicles off the highways and local roads were impassable). I rushed the "York Digital Record" online with summaries of snow emergency information. A week later, the snow melted and ice blocked the Susquehanna River. which overflowed its banks. We posted flood updates online too. Traffic was in the high three figures, and we were pleased. We began publishing a daily headline and selected articles. I would update the site at midnight at the end of my shift as night city editor, after we put the print edition to bed.

The following year, in early 1997, The Times hired me as a print copy editor. I was disappointed that the Web operation was separate, in another building, with almost no regular contact with the newspaper staff. That has changed considerably, thank goodness.

In York, thanks to the march of progress and efforts of smarter people with design ability who came after me, YDR.com is a lot prettier and newsier. The hideous original (oh, those frames!) is partly preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If you click around in "Our Back Pages," you can find reports on the 1996 blizzard and flood, articles about the local band Live and the archive of our explanatory series "Untangling the Web" from December 1995. Here's part one, presented for your historical amusement.

What Is This Thing Called the Web?

Once on line, it's easy for Internet travelers to enter this growing cyberspace neighborhood and find York County connections

By Patrick LaForge Daily Record staff

A year ago, most people unfamiliar with computers had never heard of the World Wide Web. Something to do with the Internet, whatever that is, right?

Now TV commercials sport Web addresses, and mainstream magazines review new sites. Students use the Web for homework, and job hunters scan ads on it. Politicians use it to campaign for president, and Congress spends hours debating whether it poses a threat to children.

Some people believe the Web or some future souped-up version of it will transform society. Others think the accent in "hypertext" should be on "hype." Over the next several days, the Daily Record will offer a guide to this high-tech world, with a look at some places of special interest to York County.

Live connection

One Web site in particular has put York on computer screens around the world, with some help from the city's chart-topping rock band.

Last year, Jimmy Lang noticed one of his favorite bands didn't have a place on the Web where fans could go for information.

The 24-year-old network engineer for Cerfnet, a San Diego-based Internet provider, happened to have a friend who worked for Live's booking agent.

He struck a deal with the boys from York -- he would set up a Live site in return for free concert tickets. He and his girlfriend, Meg Jahnke, a 24-year-old Cerfnet network specialist, set it up in their spare time. More than a year later, Lang has been to 19 Live shows across the country, and the band's site (http://live.cerf.net) has taken off in popularity.

The site features interviews, lyrics, photographs, sound and video samples, tour dates and more. Band members even answer fan questions through an e-mail newsletter, Straight Out of York.

"A lot of fans do not get a chance to go to shows or go backstage or talk to them directly," Lang said. This gives them a chance to do that. "People who don't know the band can go to the site and get a sound sample."

The growth of the Live site has paralleled the growth on the Web. In October 1994, when the page went up, 904 people visited it. At the peak of the 1995 Live tour a year later, Lang said, as many as 10,000 people were hitting the page each month.

Read the FAQ

Like many Web sites, the Live page has a file called a FAQ that contains answers to "frequently asked questions" about the band.

The Web itself has many FAQs and guides that offer more details once you're on line. One of the best is a student guide kept at Penn State's Smeal College of Business Administration. Some basic information from that and similar documents follows.

The Web is part of a network of computer networks called the Internet that links 20 million to 39 million computer users in 50 countries.

People use the Internet to send and receive electronic mail, chat or post messages to each other, access archives and transfer software and other files. Most people access the Internet through local or national services, called providers. Most services range from $10 to $20 per month.

In mid-1989, CERN, a European particle-physics laboratory, started the World Wide Web to transfer multimedia information text, graphics, sound and primitive video to the international research community.

Average computer owners didn't start getting on the Web until commercial software for using it became widely available during the past two years.

The Web consists of computers called servers that store documents called pages. At a site, the "home page" is the first document you see. It connects you to other pages.

Storing information are more than 135,000 servers operated by universities, research centers, major corporations, individuals and kitchen-table businesses.

Each server has a specific Internet address. Users navigate the Web with software called browsers, chief among them Netscape and Mosaic. The programs use a computer's modem to connect with the Internet through a telephone line.

Surf and crawl In a world where many people still can't program a VCR, the Web still isn't a user-friendly paradise. You need to know the basics: How to set up a modem, how to operate basic computer software like Windows or the MacIntosh desktop, and how to work a mouse.

Once you are on line, navigation is pretty simple. You can bring files to your screen in two ways:

--By typing the Universal Resource Locator. Every Web page has a unique URL that starts with the letters "http://" that's short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Browsers can also view documents that do not use hypertext.

--By clicking with the computer mouse on a link in a Web page that points to the address of another document.

--Web pages are written in Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, which allows text to appear in various colors and sizes. The language can also be used to embed graphics or sound and video files in the page.

The browser also stores the links you've hit, leaving a trail of electronic bread crumbs that you can follow back and forth from each page you visit (It's common for users to find themselves flying off on tangents from link to link.)

Wait a minute, or two

Even with a powerful computer, a fast modem, up-to-date software and a first-rate Internet provider, connections to other servers and pages can be slow, especially if they have a lot of pictures and graphics.

Lang, the designer of the Live site, said the biggest problem is that some providers simply do not have enough telephone lines for the amount of information going back and forth. This capacity is called "bandwidth."

"If you're a user on one of these providers, you'll notice a lot of sluggishness. Things are slow, they don't work," Lang said. "That's because they're selling four or five on-ramps a week, and it's only a 10-lane freeway. You're just going to have a big parking lot, really. You have to stay ahead of the people who are coming on line."

Adam Viener, a partner in Cyberia Communications Inc., a York County provider of direct Internet access, agreed that's part of the problem.

"We're adding about five lines a month to keep up with it," he said.

Viener said things could speed up quite a bit next year when GTE begins offering Integrated Services Digital Network lines. For now, York County lags behind other parts of the country.

Better hardware and a good Internet connection can only do so much, though. Often the problem is with the site a user is trying to reach, he said.

The server at the other end may be down for maintenance, which could leave you waiting for an answer, or it might have inadequate lines or hardware.

Home pages -- particularly those put up by hobbyists -- suffer from programming problems or go off line without warning. And sometimes a site's popularity spells its doom: Servers have been known to shut down pages that get too much traffic and interfere with other operations.

Viener predicted these problems would be solved as the Web matures. The sites that are going to be successful are the ones that run properly and quickly, he said.

[Copyright 1995 by The York Daily Record. Used with permission.]

An Opinion About Blue Batak

It is a little known fact that coffee improves your objectivity as a journalist. O.K., I'm kidding. I don't believe in "objectivity" and usually avoid the word. It sounds like an impossible God-like standard. Most people who use that term are setting up a straw man. I prefer terms like balance, neutrality, fairness. And conventional newspaper journalism can certainly reach conclusions, so long as they are supported by evidence, and qualified.

This just happens to be a topic on my mind and in my Twitter stream. The fairness/objectivity debate is in the air.

I work for a news organization that promises fairness and ethics. Like Buddhist enlightenment and perfection in general, they may not be attainable. The value to the reader comes from aiming for the worthy goal, without fear or favor, bias or prejudice. Even the best newspapers print corrections every day, but they still set accuracy as the standard. We don't give up because perfect accuracy is unattainable. A journalist who expresses political opinions risks abandoning the habit of keeping an open mind, risks losing the audience and access to sources that might give a more well-rounded picture of the debate, whatever it might be.

There's a risk that a decided mind is a closed one that overlooks facts and lacks empathy for all sides in a contested debate. Reserving judgment is a sound habit for a political journalist, and others who cover controversial topics.

For these reasons, I don't share my political opinions, when I have them. Most traditional journalists are the same. The work should speak for itself. A great reporter should be able to cover an atheists' convention or a Christian revival without drawing complaints of bias from any quarter and without revealing any beliefs about God. Who cares about one person's opinion, really? Opinions are plentiful and easy to come by. Reporting is hard work. It is a higher calling than argument and persuasion.

But we're here to talk about coffee. I have opinions about it. No contradiction there. I don't have a problem passing judgment on coffee, the quality of books and writing, TV shows, the usefulness of gadgets and other topics. For one thing, my day job does not involve reporting about or critiquing these things. They also fall in the realm of inconsequential opinions, right up there with "nice weather" and "you look great." So let's return to my coffee quest.

Name Blue Batak

Origin Mandheling, Sumatra

Roasted Sept. 1 by Verve Coffee Roasters of Santa Cruz.

Purchased Sept. 4 at Café Grumpy, 224 W. 20th St., Manhattan, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Description Chocolate and caramel biscuit tones, earthy graham-cracker graininess, citrus, dried pineapple and plum, tree bark, cinnamon stick, etc. (see below).

In the Cup The Verve Web site, alas, still seems to be a work in progress. All I know about Sumatra and Blue Batak are from this entry at Sweet Maria's:

We offer the top grade, specially-prepared Lintong coffees as Blue Batak in honor of the Toba Batak people. Blue Batak is a near-zero defect preparation, without the usual split beans, broken pieces and crud found in standard Sumatras. It is carefully density sorted and triple-hand-sorted. The dry fragrance has chocolate and caramel biscuit tones, but with a slight earthy and graham cracker graininess. Surprising fruits come forward in the wet aroma, even a momentary whiff of citrus, pineapple, dried plum, fig. It's got great rustic sweetness, aromatic tree bark, cinnamon stick, black tea, and mulling spice in the finish. The body is a bit lighter than the Onan Ganjang micro-lot we have as a sister lot, even though they come from areas that are very close to each other. It also has less of the herbal notes found in other Lintong coffees, which I think makes it a better choice for use in espresso.

So -- no crud -- got that? That's quite a laundry list of flavors. I can't speak to the tree bark, but there was a finish of black tea and certainly a sweetness. I liked this coffee quite a bit, as I often do when there's a hint of chocolate and caramel. I mostly drank it as an espresso. No crud. (Here's some more information about the Dutch term Mandehling)

Good coffee. Nice weather. You look great.

Third-Party iPhone Apps I Actually Still Use

Update: New list for October 2014 is here.

More often than I care to recall, I have impulsively downloaded a fancy new iPhone application, only to have it languish on my phone. That was the inspiration for the first "list of iPhone apps I actually use" last year, after the iTunes store started selling third-party applications. Since then, the number of new applications has grown rapidly. Now there's a cottage industry of lists, blogs and podcasts devoted to reviewing applications. Here's a recent Techcrunch list of the "best" apps, which notes the store had 300 new apps rolling out every day. Here's a similar post at Gizmodo, which put the total number of apps at more than 74,000. Many of the lists that try to sort out the best applications seem to focus more on flash than substance.

In August, I finally renewed my AT&T contract and upgraded to the iPhone 3GS. It seemed like the right time to reconsider the programs I had loaded onto my phone. Did I actually use them?

Here's my revised list:

Bento This has quickly become one of my favorites. For the Mac, the $49 Bento 2 is a quick and easy database program that works with spreadsheets and other data sets, like staff lists, to-do lists, project tracking, and so on. The iPhone Bento software syncs beautifully with it, so you have all your important data on your phone. Too bad it's not free with the computer software, but I didn't mind paying $4.99. This could work as a standalone iPhone application (if you live in a Windows PC world, say) but a warning: There are a number of bad reviews on the iTunes store from people who tried building databases directly on the iPhone. I haven't tried; as a way to sync and render Bento 2 files on an iPhone, this app is great.

Google Mobile App I still use this application quite a bit to search the Web, bypassing Safari. It used to be the only way to search the contents of the phone (now the iPhone OS can do that, too). Voice search is cool, but it's still something of a party trick. The word recognition is getting better all the time, though it has trouble in loud places like the sidewalks of New York. I hope they keep tweaking it. I also enjoy Google Earth, another nifty iPhone toy.

MightyDocs If you use Google Documents, this gives you fast access to them over the phone. And if you are going to be away from easy Internet access, you can cache them all on your phone. It now has basic spreadsheet support, which was missing in the original. And it's still free.

ReaddleDocs But you may have documents you don't want to keep in the cloud. This $4.99 app offers a drag-and-drop solution from your computer over a WiFi network to the phone for a range of documents, including Word docs, spreadsheets, PDFs and more. A lot of people seem to use the similar Airsharing tool, but ReaddleDocs has been a smoother experience for me, with more features and flexibility. It comes with 512mb of online storage, syncs with MobileMe and iDisk, and a variety of other Web cloud solutions. It even has a built-in browser that lets you save Web content, making it a possible replacement for bookmark/clipping applications like Evernote, which I still have on my phone and computers but don't use much.

Echofon Pro (formerly called Twitterfon) is my main choice for a Twitter phone client. It handles retweeting seamlessly (without giving you attitude, like its competitor Tweetie). It can show tweets and replies in a conversation format, among other cool features. The free, advertising-supported version is just as good.

Facebook Newly updated, this application is nicely put together, attractive, with intuitive navigation of the Facebook site. Some reviewers say the iPhone version is better than the Web site, and perhaps that is a hint about the mobile future to come, when computers go the way of typewriters and most of us carry the Internet in our pockets.

PicPosterous One-click picture and video posting to a Posterous photo blog page (here's mine), for quick sharing with friends. It will also autopost to other social media sites like Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. This app is a snap. Here's an auto-slideshow I posted of the aftermath of a taxi fire near my apartment.

Textplus AT&T used to include 200 free SMS text messages a month with the iPhone data plan. Now it wants you to pony up a monthly fee or pay by the message, making those bits some of the most expensive on the Internet. I don't use enough text messages to warrant paying for a plan, so I'm a la carte. One way to keep costs down is with this free ad-supported application. It gets around the cost by setting up a Web-based group chat with you and your correspondents. Once you text their phone numbers they can reply at no cost to you, even if they don't have TextPlus themselves. With push notification, it behaves like the native SMS client.

AIM Another free alternative to SMS is instant messaging via mobile. I have a lot of work contacts on AIM, gChat and similar networks. This application loads those contacts and lets me chat by phone (again, without per-message charges).

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary At $49.99, this is the most expensive application on my list, and possibly one of the most expensive in the iTunes store. It has more than 600,000 words and definitions, a distillation of the 20-volume O.E.D. into just two volumes. It includes all words in current English from 1700 to the present, and includes a word-of-the-day feature and a randomizing feature for browsing. The best resource for learning the derivations of obscure words.

Shakespeare The complete works of William Shakespeare in a well-designed reader. Follow along at Shakespeare in the Park. Free, from Readdle.

Kindle for iPhone Many people don't agree, but I think that the e-book reading experience on this application is better than the actual Kindle, especially if you like to curl up with your reading material at night without bothering with a booklight. And now I don't have much choice, since my Kindle 1 exploded, and I'm not ready to commit to a new one. At least I still have access to the books I bought with this free app. Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions don't work, nor can you read documents you have sent to yourself or ebooks from sources other than Amazon. The coolest feature is the Whisper Sync: It takes you to the most recent page you read, whether on the phone or the Kindle.

Stanza This is an even better e-book reader, a competitor that Amazon bought out. Alas, it doesn't connect to the Amazon store or read the Kindle format (yet). The library connects to Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks and other services that offer free public-domain texts of many classics. You can also buy books from certain indie operations. The page-turning, fonts and other features are superior to the Kindle for iPhone application. You can even put your own documents and ebooks into Stanza, a feature supported by the Kindle but not its iPhone cousin.

iWant For when you just want to quickly find a nearby restaurant, bar or gas station, without gee-whiz graphics to impress your friends. It's free.

Yelp The user-rating restaurant/bar/etc site powers many other location-based restaurant apps, so you might as well use Yelp's app, which works well and is attractive. Just be sure apply a grain of salt to the reviews by the site's notoriously cranky and vengeful users.

UpNext 3D NYC If you want to show off gee-whiz graphics while out on the town, this $2.99 mapping application is a great option, so long as the town is Manhattan (sorry, rest of New York City and the U.S.). The map is rendered in 3-D with each building's contents inventoried, and listings features will zip you around the map to newly opened restaurants, bars and so forth.

Urbanspoon Some people swear by this random restaurant finder, an early application in the store. I think it's gimmicky and annoying, but I do resort to its roulette wheel charms when I'm in a large group and we can't agree on a cuisine or a price range. It's also a good app for showing off the phone to newbies.

NYTimes The first version of my employer's fre reader was too slow for some, but the latest update is pretty snappy. The articles download faster, you can bookmark them and share them via e-mail. Since my Kindle had its meltdown, this is my main portable way to read the paper. If I know I have a long subway ride, I download the news before heading underground to the land of no Internet. There is a menu that shows all the photos from the paper, and it's pretty easy to customize the sections you want to see when you first open the application.

WSJ Why pay for online news from The Wall Street Journal when you can get it free with this nicely done mobile reader? But note the warning: "Access to subscriber-only content available without charge for a limited time only."

NPR News My wife can't bear to be separated from National Public Radio, and I am a sometimes addict myself. But when we travel, we sometimes find ourselves out of range of a good public radio station. This audio player is great for listening to any NPR shows at any time, either recorded versions or live streaming from NPR stations. The unrelated Public Radio Player is pretty good, too, and lets you listen to streaming content from a long list of local public radio stations (not just NPR).

AOL Radio, Last.FM and Pandora. Another way to turn the iPhone into a radio is with one or all of these free players. Lilsten to Internet radio, create streaming customized channels, and even buy music.

Remote This was one of the earliest and coolest free iPhone tools. Turn the phone into a full-featured iTunes remote for your computer or Apple TV. Browse your media library in the palm of your hand.

i.TV Television listings on your phone, with push notifications to remind you of upcoming programs and user reviews. The new version will eventually allow the phone to be used as a remote for Tivo HD (but not my 10-year-old TiVo Series 2, alas). It also has movie reviews and Netflix integration.

Amazon So you see a product of interest somewhere -- on a train, at a friend's house, in a brick-and-mortar store. No more scribbled notes or typing. Launch this application, and take a picture for the "You asked us to remember" function. In a few minutes, Amazon will find a similar item in its store. It worked the first time for me with a fairly poor quality picture of an obscure book's cover; no bar code required. It worked with a picture I took of a review on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. And it's not just for books. It worked for a demitasse. And with a picture of a cordless phone handset wanted to replace (alas, that model is no longer manufactured, but Amazon had a product page). It recognized a plush dinosaur toy someone bought for my daughter. You may be obsessed with finding objects it can't identify. Or you may find yourself taking pictures of every object of desire. If you're doing this in a real store, you may have to confront ethical questions. That's your business. Just watch out for the Amazon one-click -- the path from looking something up to an immediate impulse buy is nearly frictionless.

1Password The day you lose your phone, you'll be happy the person who found it doesn't have access to all your sites, accounts and passwords. This secures and encrypts them, and it syncs with the passwords on your computer. (This app was free, but you do have to pay for 1Password software for your Mac itself).

Wikipanion Look it up on Wikipedia with a few touches. But please don't cite it in your term papers if you are one of my wife's students. I tried a few Wikipedia apps and settled on this one for its easy lookup functions. I'm testing the official Wikipedia application, as well as Wapedia, and will revise this post if I come to like one of them more.

WikiHow A free version of the popular how-to Wiki. It includes a bonus survival guide stored on your phone, for emergencies how-to situations (My favorite: "How to Escape From the Trunk of a Car.")

Mixologist I'm mostly a wine-and-beer guy, but every now and then I find myself at a beach house with an odd assortment of liquor and mixers. This 99-cent application lets you search for the drink you can make with the ingredients at hand, using a nice interface. There are many other cocktail recipes for the amateur bartender. There's also a liquor store finder built into it. If this application sounds more appealing than it should, you might consider this one.

Brushes This simple finger-painting program is a favorite of artists and was famously used to create a New Yorker cover. Now it has layers and photo-importing, and even the most artistically challenged painter can create beautiful images.

I Dig It, Waterslide, Parapanic, Jelly Car, Tapword, Bejeweled, Toy Bot Diaries, de Blob, Stone of Destiny, Scrabble, Enigmo, Tetris, Super Monkey Ball, DizzyBeeFree, BattleAtSea, Bubblewrap, Morocco The iPhone is a great gaming platform. Games tend to a few dollars or more on iTunes, so you have to choose carefully. These are among the best, based on extensive kid-testing with my 9-year-old daughter and her friends (I helped). Several take great advantage of the touchscreen, accelerometer and other functions in clever ways.

Shazam and Midomi Fun with music. Amuse your friends. Hold Shazam up to a playing music source, and it identifies the song. Midomi is similar, but you can also say lyrics or hum to get a list of possible song titles. One day at work we were all standing around singing songs into it. Karaoke without background music, a terrifying spectacle. The link shows a Shazam-Midomi face-off on YouTube; Shazam won for reliability and usefulness. Both are free and worth having, although the novelty of these party tricks wears off eventually. Another fun music application is the Ocarina, which turns the phone into a musical instrument broadcasting on the Internet, but I don't use it that much.

Live Cams Another useless stunt app. Browse public Webcams, and view your own private cams if you know the address. Pretty much a waste of time, but interesting. The marketing suggests you can use it to watch semiclad people on beaches, but, uh, there might be easier ways to find that on the Internet. I like to look at Times Square to make sure it's still there. New parents might want to use it to set up a babycam in the nursery.

iHandy Level Sometimes you just want to know if that table is level. This is a sometimes-useful tool that will impress old timers who think the iPhone is a useless tool. Free (for now). Is there a great or useful application I've missed and should try? Tell me in the comments.

'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.