What are you doing right now? Zymurgism.

… one of my best friends from high school has recently joined Twitter.

Louis and I used to surf the local East Texas BBS scene, and he and I were one of the first people to actually use the Internet in the area. He’s since left the tech field for greener pastures, but last month he finally got around to joining Twitter.

He’s also taken up the rare art of amateur zymurgism, or in other words he’s trying to brew some beer in his garage.

Rather than go through the trouble of creating a blog all about his microbrewery efforts, he’s decided to just tweet them.

“Most of what's going on with my beer can be done in 140 characters,” he told me. He added, “I’m going to start a second batch this week of ale.”

Given all the ridiculous volume of twitter talk in the tech blogosphere, I thought it was perhaps newsworthy that someone was actually using Twitter as it was originally intended.

You can follow Louis here on Twitter.

Your #@%# Twitter Conference, Part II

There are quite a few Twitter conferences that seem to be taking place today – I’ve seen quite a bit of press around the 140 Characters conference today.

I won’t say who it is, but I saw a name show up as one of the speakers at one of these Twitter conference events giving a speech that had to do with Twitter and charity or curing social ills or something like that who I’m quite sure has not a single charitable bone in his body.

I won’t go into the nitty-gritty details, but depending on whether you believe his version of events or mine, he cheated me out of either a couple grand or around $13k.

Beyond that, and more germane to the topic, he’s got at best a couple hundred Twitter followers less than I do, and is by no means any sort of expert on Twitter or charity.

There are some influential and interesting people speaking at this thing, and I by no means want to demean them. Without exception, though, every single person who matters and is speaking at this thing mattered before they got on Twitter.

Most of the speakers I’m seeing at these things are people with either a couple hundred or a couple thousand followers.

The bottom line – Twitter is a very nuanced and interesting tool.  Chances are, though, if you can find your way to one of these conferences, you’ve already found your way to millions of blog posts covering these very topics. Moreover, most of the best practices and power of Twitter can be discovered simply by using it.

I don’t need to pay $1,500 to do that, and chances are if you’re reading this, neither do you.

Twitter TV Show Official, But Not Exclusive [Tweets and TWiTs]

Update: Twitter issues a clarifying post, again.  MG has a good roundup of what it means, but I thought I’d just add the fact that they still don’t deny any sort of financial gain from the deal.

The implication, earlier today, was that Twitter was venturing into TV as the way they were going to make their money – the idea was that all the money would be made from licensing, as opposed to that pesky ad sales stuff that Twitter claims they know nothing about.

I’ve really only followed two stories this Memorial day – one is the continuing saga of the FTC vs. the blogosphere, and the other is this Twitter thing.

The Twitter TV venture was particularly interesting to me because of the idea that it theoretically infringes on Leo Laporte’s trademark of TWiT. There are several places where discussion broke out about that.

• Leo’s original Friendfeed thread.
• Leo’s other Friendfeed thread.
• SiliconANGLE blog post.
• the SA comments.
• This offshoot of the SA blog post on Friendfeed.

The bottom line from the discussion seems to be that neither side of the case is clear cut, but if Twitter is in any way making financial gain here, it’s obvious that Leo ought to try to defend his trademark, and will likely receive either points in the company or part of the proceeds of any such venture.

Twitter has tried to cut that off at the pass by issuing a non-denial:

There is no official Twitter TV show—although if there were it would be fun to cast! In dealing with networks and production companies we sometimes have simple agreements. Regarding the Reveille and Brillstein project reported today, we have a lightweight, non-exclusive, agreement with the producers which helps them move forward more freely.

It’s important to note that while they said the agreement was “open” and “lightweight” and “non-exclusive,” they never said “we’re not making money from this.”

The fact of the matter is that Twitter is giving their blessing to these occurrences, and it changes nothing (but the size of the pocketbook that Leo could theoretically attack) as to whether or not Leo should protect his trademark.

It’s also somewhat non-sequitur in the context of this post, but I think it might be helpful if I quote a bit of my comments here:

[W]hen I was a kid (about 13 or 14), I was a witness in a Federal trademark suit between an ISP called Neosoft and a software maker named NeoSoftware. The ISP was suing the software maker for rights to the name because they said it caused brand confusion.

It turns out that the suit was dismissed by the judge because it was revealed during the case that the ISP was planning on moving into software sales.

The point being, the burden here lies on the aggressor, the one trying to expand the scope of their brand, and the favor lies in the one who actually holds the trademark. Leo has a double-whammy here - he's already doing broadcast and video - something that Twitter wants to expand into.

I think Leo here has a very good case should he want to pursue it, and he's either going to end up with points in the company or a percentage of all profits derived by the name.

Leo’s trademark is designated for broadcast and multimedia. Twitter toed that line with their existing service, but have clearly given their blessing to cross that threshold.  A heads up and a clearing of the air with Leo is at least in order.

I’m Not Coming to Your @#%@ Twitter Conference

Steven Hodson noted last night that there is a crap-ton of Twitter conferences surfacing lately.

• 140 Characters Conference - $495 – $1,195
• Media140 Twitter Conference UK – it already happened, price not on site.
• TWTRCON SF 09 - $325 – 595
• 140/The Twitter Conference - $395
• Perkins Madrona Twitter Conference 09 – already happened, price not on site.
• Twitter Boot Camp - $299 – $1,500

If you want to know my thoughts on these things, ask Mona.  She was online when I first caught wind of the 140 Characters Conference, and then stuck around later when I apologized for exposing her to a stream of obscenities.

It’s nothing personal about the guys behind the conference either.  I have great respect for Jeff Pulver, and in general I think Twitter is a great and versatile tool. But, like Steven, I don’t think you’ll ever see me at one of these conferences.

It’s not that there isn’t something to be learned about Twitter still – but do we need to pay as much as a grand or two just to talk about how to manage an account that only allows 140 characters?

Seriously – just stop what you’re doing – take a breath – ponder that for a moment. $1,500 for a day’s worth of pontification about Twitter.

Are these conferences for people who are bad at reading blogs? Can someone explain it to me?  If someone can figure out how to justify this, maybe I’ll flip my position… you know I can talk about Twitter all day long, and I’m just dying to find a auditorium full of rubes willing to pay me $1,500 a day to listen to my blather.

Of Vampires and Gawker

Not to pile on the criticism, but Business Insider / Silicon Alley Insider got taken in by a PR / Marketing stunt that Gawker Media had bought a new blog this weekend. The story, as they would have had us believe it, is that Gawker bought a blog that writes about vampires from the perspective of a human who recently was turned into a vampire.

Yeah. Somehow this didn’t ring any alarm bells at all for them.  Somehow not a single genius analyst at BI / SAI was able to remember back to the last time Nick Denton made a statement about whether it’s better to consolidate media brands or expand.

It isn’t as if he kept it a secret. Wanna learn more about it? Try this blog post at the Wall Street Journal. Or this one on Gawker by Owen Thomas. Or this other one on Gawker by Hamilton Nolan. Or this coverage here at PaidContent. Or dozens of other posts like this one from indie blogger Jay Yarow. Or this post from the man himself.

So why, and I’m sincerely curious here, why would they not deign to question getting a press release from a company that isn’t Gawker.com, but an anonymous PR / Ad firm called “CampfireNYC” claiming to be trumpeting the news of a blog purchase? Why not make a call to Valleywag?

Look, I’m a nobody and a personae non grata when it comes to the who’s-who of NYC and Silicon Valley.  I live in Dallas, Texas for Pete’s sake. Sure, some people know my name on the coasts, and in the tech punditry business I’m fairly well known, but I’ve never had my pictures regularly in the pages of Valleywag, and I know I’m probably barely on Nick Denton’s radar, if at all.

How much digging did it take me to get his phone number this morning, though? Two tries going down the list of people in my GTalk list, and I had a number I was assured would get him wherever he was.

The truth is, though, that the thought of it is so ridiculous that Nicholas Carlson wrote a several page post about how embarrassed BI / SAI was and how ‘stupid and irresponsible Gawker was’ for sanctioning this.

If you want to see what a mad dash to recover credibility looks like, you should check out the post mortem write-up at SAI and the coverage over at AllThingsD.

The bottom line is that through insufficient legwork, SAI got taken in by a hoax. It happens to us all once in a while – it’s even happened to me before. You take your knocks, you say “good one!” and you move on. You don’t try to chalk it up and spin it to some sort of odd “the blogosphere needs to learn disclosure” trope. It was a hoax – granted a sponsored hoax – but a hoax none the less.

The moral here, though, is to follow your instincts, and if a story is too good to be true – pick up the phone.

TwitterMass Goes to Auction: Is It Worth It?

“[TwitterMass] is evil!  -Loic Lemeur

Right now, if you’re a developer and out of work, you need to be working on your own Twitter application. The ability to rapidly launch an application, monetize it and then turn it over for cash has never been easier.

I’ve been playing around, re-aquainting myself with the Twitter API lately, as I talked a bit about yesterday. I’ve also been monitoring the various web forums where a lot of these sales often take place, and almost without fail, Twitter applications of varying complexity and usefulness get snapped up at most a few days after they’re put up for sale (as long as they’re priced reasonably).

That’s why I’m not surprised that TwitterMass has chosen to put themselves up for sale right now while the hype is hot, but I am a bit surprised at the price: $250,000 (the BIN). The bidding is currently up to $13,000, but there’s plenty of time for the price to get to where it needs to be, since it’s a 30-day auction with 27 days left.

Is it a good deal? Let’s take a look at the metrics they’re offering for public view.

They say they’re pulling down 30,000 uniques a month, and ~150,000 pageviews. They also say that they’ve leveraged that into an income of $6,000 already – not the best monetization stats. There really isn’t a whole lot of ads being sold on the site, though, as the main focus is to drive users to purchase the service at the $99 pricepoint.

With better ad placement and representation (as part of a larger portfolio of sites or represented by a higher quality ad firm), monetization could easily add another $2,000 a month at current traffic levels.

There’s also an issue of scaling involved to consider.  Jesse Stay’s SocialToo does some of the same things that this product does, and he’s run into a number of problems providing those services without continually running into the API limitations of Twitter. Whomever takes this purchase is going to have to plan for scaling in that regard as well as scaling of the site as well, which is written in Ruby.

Could it make easily $100k a year?  It could.  Not easily, but it could. Costs on this project are undoubtedly going to rise, and the $250k pricetag is a bit unproven, given it only has one month’s track record.

My advice is that if this company appeals to you and looks like it’d fit in well with your portfolio, try to win it in auction, but forgo the “buy-it-now” pricetag.

[hat tip to Allen Stern @ CenterNetworks]

Google Can’t Launch Twoogle, I Did

Mark Evans yesterday mused what would happen if Google were to launch a microblogging service in a post called “What if Google Started Twoogle?”

It’s an interesting exercise, and a thought worthy of discussion (something I explored to some extent in this older SiliconANGLE story).

As you may have noticed a few weeks ago, I quietly launched an application I’m code-naming “Twoogle Reader.” It’s an add-on to my otherwise almost-useless and certainly superfluous URL shortener riz.gd.

I opened it up to a limited Alpha release, and a number of influential personalities and avid Google Reader users signed on, like Veronica Belmont, the famous Techmeme tweeter Atul, and Robert Scoble himself (a quick summize scan for riz.gd will give you a fuller picture of these early adopters).

I’m already starting to see some very interesting data emerge in terms of levels of engagement on Twitter, something I hope to analyze further and release as a SiliconANGLE Labs project soon. The data shows information that’s counter-intuitive to what you’d think would lead to higher engagement when it comes to how well known influencers versus those with small social graphs.

I’m also forseeing that this data I’m collecting from Twoogle Reader in tandem with the URL shortener (usage stats, metadata) is putting me in an excellent position to function as a bookmarking utility, a secondary lifestreaming tool, analytics provider, and a myriad of other applications.

The point in which a link is shared and when it’s clicked on by a focused audience is a neat place to be, and best of all, it’s providing a valuable service to the end users as well (instead of being a simply one-sided relationship like so many Web 2.0 tools). Instead of requiring the user to remember yet another social network to maintain, the aim of my application is to help unite the discovery and sharing process in a useful and transparent way.

Given that I’ve reserved my weekends for the last few weeks to tweak this service and haven’t said much about it publicly, I’d just figured a status report might be in order.

Current users – sound off! What do you love/hate about it? As I move it forward, what aspects would you like me to focus on?

Non-users – interested in participating in the Alpha and Beta tests? Think it’s just completely retarded or totally awesome? Let me know.

Israel’s Shin Bet Warns of Arab Terror Recruiting on Facebook

According to an AP Newswire piece this evening, Israel’s internal intelligence organization Shin Bet “warned Israelis against answering unsolicited messages or sharing telephone numbers and other sensitive information over the Internet” because “Arabs are trying to recruit spies on the popular social networking site.”

"Terror organizations are using these sites to tempt Israelis to meet up in person in order to either abduct them, kill them or recruit them as spies," the Shin Bet said.

Additionally, a number of examples were given where Israeli citizens were either arrested for giving strategic information to enemies of the state and members of terrorist Al Qaida cells.

I trot this editorial angle out about three times a year, but I continue to do it because I think it’s important. Every time I brought it up at Mashable, I was accused of being a ‘neocon media whore’ (or, my personal favorite, a proto-fascist). I think it bears repeating and review, though, because there’s a lot at stake and a lot that could be done that simply isn’t.

The truth is, though, that Loren Feldman and Joe Lieberman had very strong and unpopular points when they talked about a future where what Shin Bet is warning of is commonplace.

Joe Lieberman’s Warning to Google
Last year in May, Joe Lieberman issued a warning to YouTube to stop allowing internationally recognized terrorist cells to create recruitment channels on YouTube. At the time, YouTube pretty much told him to bugger off.  I chronicled this as well as YouTube’s history of being consistently inconsistent with regard to their attitudes on censorship.

The fact remains that the videos are there to promote the organization, and those organizations regularly organize the killings of innocent humans, in Iraq and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, YouTube is capricious and arbitrary about content that they’ll take down that they do deem as promoting hate speech, objectionable, or promoting of violence, and what they don’t.  Let’s go down the list, shall we?

Michelle Malkin: Censored for promoting hate speech, when she created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots.
BumFights: Uncensored. Videos of actual homeless folks paid in sandwiches for beating the crap out of one another.
Handsome Hong Kong Guy Censored for showing videos of clothed local females with derogatory towards women music in the background.
This Pornography Advertisement Uncensored. It doesn’t show actual nudity or sex acts.
A Breast-Feeding Mother Censored over obscenity claims.
This Strip Tease Uncensored. A small area over the genitals remains covered for the duration of the minute and a half long strip tease.
An Egyptian Fellow Censored (then uncensored) for showing video evidence of local police brutality.
This GTA IV Ad Uncensored, despite depicting a police officer firing a gun into a crowd of civilians.

As the pattern of hypocrisy indicates, YouTube has very little track record when it comes to censorship.  Several months later, in September of 2008, YouTube finally decided to crack down on terrorists, though, and heed my advice of “policing themselves or wait for the government to do it for them.”

It’s unclear exactly what’s changed, except that YouTube’s given a nod to the Senator, and a quote to the Washington Post that they’re going to decide things on a case by case basis.

Generally, the only thing that seems to influence Google to do the right thing in the past has been a combination of media and government pressure. The most prime example of this which springs to mind is the case of Orkut and the literal infiltration of pedophiles onto the system. The story stayed on our radar for quite some time, starting with reports in January of 2007 as noted by Pete, the problem continuing to grow on into September when Google decided to do something about policing their community, as noted by Kristen.

Google continued to protect the identities of pedophiles from Brazilian authorities for months, asnoted by Sean in October and myself in April of this year. Finally, in late April, Google finally caved to widespread media criticism and governmental authority and began cooperating with police in turning over the identities of those trafficking in pictures and video of under-aged sex acts.

Loren Feldman and Chris Brogan’s Warning to the World
During the summer of 2008, a huge controversy arose around videoblogger Loren Feldman, who’s most famous in the tech-set for his Robert Scoble and Shel Israel puppets. Over a year earlier, he’d put out a series of video posts that very controversially pointed out the virility of certain ideas in social media, particularly when it came to racially charged posts.

I won’t re-hash all the nitty-gritty details, but it came to a head when a civil rights activist raised a protest to Verizon, who at the time had just agreed to carry Feldman’s posts on their mobile video network, but subsequently dropped the contract with Feldman over public pressure.

What most people fail to realize to this day was that Feldman’s publicity stunt had very little to do with race, per se, and more to do with showing how bad and sometimes downright evil ideas can be very powerfully amplified with almost no effort or capitalization behind them. It was a thought that I tried to emphasize during all the reactionary browbeating that took place in the blogosphere to almost no avail. 

The only time I had any success was when I admitted my fear of putting my job in jeopardy, and leaned on the credibility of Chris Brogan, who also had the courage to stand up and re-iterate the true message Loren was trying to put across:

Chris Brogan very rightly likens the current controversy over the New Yorker magazine cover to the Loren Feldman incident as an echo. The mainstream media is performing their punditry over the “Terrorist Fist Jab” in much the same black and white tones as we did last week over the Loren Feldman “TechNigga” video. [Brogan] goes on to ponder the fact that there might be more important things to worry about.

“But this is what’s out there. This is the surface. This isn’t the secret campaigns that will (are?) spread through social networks, across back channels, hidden in some other kind of FriendFeed that we haven’t seen. Or maybe it’ll be out in the open, as Louis Gray reported on a short while back.”

“For a moment, we need to consider the larger implications of how social media can power some really negative experiences. Flash mobs are fun. But what else could they be?”

What’s really ironic here is that this is one of the larger points that Loren Feldman was driving at with his satire (and he even spelled it out verbatim in an expletive-laden post after the series, embedded below). In between all the “gotcha, you’re a racist” moments in the conversation surrounding this, it seems that point is what was lost.

Chris goes on to say: “This isn’t one of those “film at 11″ shocker posts. Instead, it’s something I wanted to write to say that if you think that beating Loren Feldman down because his video broke away from satire and fell into racism, then you’ve lost. The fight is, I believe, a lot more sinister, running deeper under the radar than that, and with names that aren’t in the blogosocialmediacirclefishbowl sphere.”

As I outlined above and in other pieces elsewhere, terrorism is alive and well on the web. If you’re curious as to how social media is being used for ill-intent, you should just take a gander at your favorite source for Internet security news. 

Everyone’s into it these days – even governments! China and Russia are headline offenders, but tons of governments these days use social media to recruit the disillusioned of society into ideologies, and then manipulate them into cyber-terrorism or straight up suicide bombing.

The dark side of mainstream social networking tools is a blindspot for the operators of these sites, let alone most of us users. 

I repeat my refrain, though – it’s a topic that deserves more attention and thought, because if we don’t decide how to handle this, the government will decide for us.  It’s an issue far too important to them to let lay, and I for one am not interested in the government taking control of what can and can’t be said on the Web.

About that Present.io Article…

Several tweets say that it was on this URL – My bad, it’s actually in the main blog.  Just click here, and we’ll forget about this mess.

Erasing Past Work from the Present

Business Insider has a piece from Dan Frommer discussing what appears to be an epidemic – Journalism professionals wishing to erase their crappy college work from existence:

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice feature about the subject in its May 15 issue, called "Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites."

But it turns out this is more common than we thought. Someone from my alma mater -- Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism -- is petitioning the school paper right now to remove some of their columns from the site that they're not particularly proud of. In this case, the paper wouldn't delete the articles -- that's really crossing the line -- but it might consider hiding them from Google, which could be less troublesome.

Last night on CobWEBs, we talked about why it seems people in our sector don’t reach for the simple solution when trying to rectify problems. Both Dan and his friend (who he quoted in his BI piece) suggest either redacting the original pieces, or hiding them from Google since they have higher SERP rankings.

Here’s an idea – writing something better!

There’s a million ways to get better SERPs for newer articles – how about doing a guest post for a high pagerank blog, and instead of linking to old college work in your bio, link to the new stuff?

Or how about hitching your new articles’ feeds to Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed?

There are a million ways to fix this ‘problem’ without self-censorship.

Of course, that’d mean learning about how the Internet works, and then engaging critical thinking – something Heritage Media journalists are often loathe to do.

Crackle Ceases to be Interesting for Anyone

News comes today via NewTeeVee that Crackle is cutting off user uploads, in an email that was supposedly sent out to their users yesterday (though for some reason, I was excluded from this mailing):

[B]eginning June 1, 2009, general video uploading will no longer be supported by Crackle. Videos that you have previously uploaded to Crackle may still be available for viewing by accessing your profile page while logged in to Crackle, or by those who have bookmarked them. Sharing of uploaded videos via the “send” function in the video player is no longer supported. Consider taking some time to bookmark videos that you would like to continue to view. This availability, however, may be temporary. You should plan accordingly. We apologize for any inconvenience this transition has caused you.

I think it’s a poor move, all things considered.  I’m fairly certain that Sony’s own content isn’t what’s motivating the majority of their pageviews:

Still, as Sony doesn’t have an ad company backing them, it isn’t likely they’re going to beat Google / YouTube to the monetization brass ring.

I still can’t hope but wonder why they don’t at least try, though. backing out – actively de-emphasizing content that many other content video networks would kill to have?  I’m definitely scratching my head.

For those looking to find my content on Crackle, you should head on over to my member page, or scroll down for some of the highlights.

From Crackle: Three in the Afternoon

From Crackle: Ernie Mosteller Brunner

From Crackle: Rizzn with Rudder Save Your Finances

riz.gd Gets Popular [holy crap!]

Earlier today I was absently and morosely looking at the decline in my visitor stats since last week I went altogether way too light on my posting on rizzn.com, and I paged over to my stats on riz.gd, and had to do a double take.

 

 

Yesterday, my stats jumped up from a dismal 100-375 unique hits a day all the way up to nearly 10,000 uniques overnight. At the moment, my stats tracking is in its infancy (as I really didn’t intend for it to go as viral as it apparently has gone this quickly), so I’m not sure who’s responsible exactly, although I’m pretty happy to see it where it is.

I went through the database of URLs, and it appears as if this is being used for the purposes of simplifying affiliate links in addition to light usage all over Twitter.

It has me pondering the feasibility of monetization, though.  My ultimate plan for the site was to make riz.gd a home for Twitter utilities of various types, though I’m not certain that’s set in stone.

I’ve got a few ideas on how to monetize it, but for the mean time, I’m keeping them under my hat until I work out all the logistics.

This weekend, I should have some better stat tracking in place (which I’ll make available to the public) as well as a bookmarklet to simplify URL creation on the fly.

Seth Finkelstein is Smarter Than You, and Doesn’t Like @You

Seth Finkelstein wrote a piece in the UK Guardian decrying Twitter as a system that exists simply for the purpose of .. how did he put it?  Oh yes: facilitating the “pathologies of celebrity,” his five-dollar term for narcissism.

He spends eleven paragraphs talking about how horrible it is when people talk about themselves and then how some people get popular from it, and then how some other people make money. That wasn’t enough ranting to get it out of his system (or as we put it in CobWEBs this evening, that rant didn’t Gillmor all the crap from his innards).

He also posted over at his personal blog, Infothought, and lamented what a mistake it was to ever inject personality into his blog:

I suspect some people are going to miss the point of this column, and tell me that, golly gee, I can chat with friends. I know that. Really. I'm well into a third decade of being on the Net (I went to MIT, I was on the Net more way before it reached the general population), and I know all about text chat. I don't want to use Twitter to chat.

I also don't want to broadcast or narrowcast my life's trivia. Encouraging exhibitionism is part of what I meant by "pathologies of celebrity". I made a deliberate, strategic choice to put "personal voice" into my blog, and in retrospect that was, overall, a pretty bad decision.

What's left is the rat race of trying to get followers for one's micropunditry and links. No. Not again. Not another grind of a few BigHeads on top all group-grooming each other, while everyone else is practically unheard. Not again, not so I can be monetized by another social/data-mining start-up.

Well, gee, here’s an idea – if you don’t want to engage people, you don’t want to reveal anything real about yourself, and you hate everyone else for climbing the social ladder to their own benefit – be anti-social on your own time.

I mean, seriously, we get it.  If your editorials reflect your true feelings, you’re an anti-social geek (with a dash of class-envy) from MIT that knows more than everyone else and hates talking to everyone. Good for you. That didn’t require two blog postings and sixteen paragraphs total.  I just summed it up in one (admittedly run-on) sentence.

That ain’t news – it’s just a bit of your personality on display for everyone (which, incidentally, goes against one of your primary objections with blogging and Twittering).

As I re-read what I wrote, I can see how one might get the impression that I’m pretty down on Seth Finkelstein – I don’t have any personal quibbles with the guy, and despite his alleged quirks, he’s undoubtedly a very deep thinker and eloquent writer.  I just think that in this instance, he’s transferring quite a bit of emotion to the technology and culture surround social media.

For what it’s worth, though, Seth’s view of Twitter is pretty myopic, and in Twitter as in life, if you find yourself hating everything and everyone, you can change one of two things to remedy it: change yourself, or change everything and everyone one else.

As Seth himself said in an interview with Harvard’s Greplaw:

There's nothing wrong with keeping an online diary which is read by friends and family. Just like there's nothing wrong with playing frequent poker games. You don't have to be a professional, or make a living at it, to enjoy it and find it worthwhile.

That is, when it comes down to it, what most people use social media tools for, be it MySpace, Twitter or blogging. Seth sees the world in shades of Winer, Lessig, and Wales. The much wider world isn’t concerned with the “A-List” rat race, and thus his railings against Twitter fall completely flat.

Once Again, Techcrunch Steps Into Quagmire on Paid Posting

I won’t go into my great big long rant about this – I covered this topic pretty thoroughly not long ago here:

• The Truth about Magpie [Google It]
• How to Buy Your Way Into the Conversation
• Other Thoughts on Sponsored Posts and Magpie [Buying Conversation]

But Sarah Lacy over at Techcrunch couldn’t resist (on what I suspect was a day of blogger writer’s blog) bagging on Ted Murphy at Izea today:

In the last few months I have gotten the same pitch from PayPerPost (now called Izea) all sent from different names. My favorite part is this:

“…while compensating bloggers was considered taboo a few years ago, there has been a paradigm shift in thinking over the last year…”

Really? Yeah, I guess that whole Google resetting the page rank of PayPerPost bloggers was all the way back in November 2007. I must have slipped into a coma and missed the “paradigm shift” since.

She goes on to act as if she’s asking an innocuous question even though someone less observant than Forest Gump could tell you she’s trying to start a fight:

Each time I’ve gotten this email, I have written back something like, “I’m sorry, I still consider paying for coverage incredibly controversial and, for a reporter, unethical. Can you explain to me what has changed about this issue?” No response. Month or so passes, then I get the same email. I honestly don’t know if the emails are being sent to me for press consideration or as a nudge that I should sign up, because it’s just obliquely titled “suggestion” in the subject line.

And then, as predictable as Kavis Alpha, comes the self-righteous knee-jerking:

So, let me address this publicly, to save the time of future Izea employees cutting and pasting the email and sending it to me again: There is no time during my life on planet earth or beyond that I will *ever* consider accepting payment for coverage. There is no circumstance or situation where I will respect a journalist who does, especially if the details of that conflict aren’t clearly disclosed. P.E.R.I.O.D.

She then constructs a series of straw-men arguments and subsequently knock them down. What doesn’t happen? A well reasoned set of circumstances where this business model could work and stay within the narrow bounds of what’s ethical for those that consider themselves simply bloggers and those that hold themselves to the standards of journalism.

What isn’t mentioned at all? Techcrunch’s company policy of monthly paid blog posts for their sponsors. Let me refresh your memory – I covered this a week or two ago:

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch has remained fairly silent recently about sponsored posting recently.  The last time he really broached the topic specifically was back in November of last year when he talked about Magpierather objectively for his personal style. When it comes to sponsored posting, though, Mike Arrington is much less vitriolic about the topic, though no less fervent, calling it shilling.

This, of course, doesn’t stop him from running posts showcasing the many sponsors of his various get-togethers, demos and conferences. I haven’t noticed many specifically sponsored posts in several months, but I know they exist in Techcrunch’s history in one form or another. No disrespect to Mike, but I think he calls it “doing business” when he does it, rather than shilling.

Last time I broached this topic on the blog, we had a great discussion about what should and shouldn’t be in-bounds.  It’s too bad the A-List is more concerned with muckraking for pageviews rather than talking about this topic with intellectual honesty.

The FBI Takes Seven Years to Develop a Top Secret FriendFeed

I was paging through a pretty well written article over at Ars Technica regarding the bumbling results of a seven year long project at the FBI to create what’s being dubbed an “everything bucket” to warehouse the data they collect on an ongoing basis.

The description will make you cringe, but go ahead and read it so the rest of what I say will make sense to you:

Earlier this week, the EFF published a new report detailing the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse, which appears to be something like a combination of Google and a university's slightly out-of-date custom card catalog with a front-end written for Windows 2000 that uses cartoon icons that some work-study student made in Microsoft Paint. I guess I'm supposed to fear the IDW as an invasion of privacy, and indeed I do, but given the report's description of it and my experiences with the internal-facing software products of large, sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracies, I mostly just fear for our collective safety.

The idea behind the system, which the FBI has been working on since at least 2002, is that the Bureau can dump all of its information in there so that it can be easily searched and shared. IDW contains more documents than the library of congress—a stew of TIFFs with OCRed text, multiple Oracle databases, news streamed in from the Internet, reports and records in various in-house data formats, watch lists, telephone data, and an alphabet soup of smaller databases and records repositories—all accessible as one sprawling system that processes batch jobs, runs queries, and issues alerts. In short, the IDW is an "everything bucket" for the FBI.

Tell me if you caught the same thing I caught (it shouldn’t be hard, since I used italics and bold). This IDW thing is basically a lifestreaming services for the whole country?

The data collected is supposedly more plentiful than the library of congress, and contains all manner of inane data, sometimes substantive and relevant discussion, and news streamed in from the Internet.

Sounds a bit like FriendFeed or the Facebook news feed (only, y’know, searchable).

Took them seven years to achieve that? Really?

I do sort of want to take a peek at the system, now, based on that revelation. Based on what the EFF has said, though, that ain’t gonna happen.

(Incidentally, I can almost guarantee that while it is probably an inferior product to FriendFeed, the color scheme is almost certainly superior).

Google: Indexing the World’s Information So Long as It’s Not a Torrent File.

Yesterday afternoon, Ernesto at TorrentFreak reported that Google has taken a quiet but definitive stance against the BitTorrent using public in blocking the access of over 28 million uTorrent users from searching the site through the use of “Google Custom Search.”

Of course, Ernesto trots out the “Don’t be evil” line, but aside from whether or not we can assign moral imperative to the move, it is fairly out of line for what I’d normally consider Google’s character to be.

BitTorrent as a technology really doesn’t interfere with or call into question any of Google’s over-arching business  strategies, and indexing and making accessible the world’s information is the company’s call to action. 

So what’s the problem?

I doubt we’ll hear official word from the company on this, but it’d sure be nice to hear them break their stoic silence on legal and censorship issues for once and say something.