I never expected to associate a “tweaser” with The Wolverine. (I assumed Wolverine’s healing powers would always extrude any splinter.)
That changed yesterday, when James Mangold, the director of the most recent cinematic treatment of the comic book hero’s adventures, tweeted the first “tweaser” of the new century. He used Twitter’s new Vine app to share the short clip, a tightly edited 6 seconds of footage from the upcoming film. You can watch Vine’s big moment in tweet embedded below.
Twitter certainly has come a long way from txt messages. As Lily Rothman quipped at Time, the emergence of a 6 second tweaser that can be retweeted, tumbled and embedded gives “new meaning to the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.”
Jen Yamato has the backstory behind 20th Century Fox’s debut of a 21st century tweaser over at Deadline, including credit to Fox executive Tony Sella for the coinage:
Last week FilmDistrict was the first studio to use Twitter’s new looping app as a marketing tool. Here’s an even buzzier use of Vine: A 6-second “tweaser” (that’s Twitter teaser, or “TWZZR”) previewing Fox’s July 26 superhero pic Wolverine.
I suspect that at least a few of the tweasers that go flickering by on Twitter, Vine and blog posts will lead people to do what I did: become aware of the upcoming and film and look for a longer version of the teaser trailer elsewhere online. If a tweaser comes with a custom short URL, so much the easier.
To that point, If you want to watch a higher quality “full-length” version of the teaser, there’s now a teaser trailer available on the iTunes Store and a YouTube version:
… which, it’s worth pointing out, can also be embedded in tweets.
Hopefully, history remember will remember “The Wolverine for more than being the subject of the world’s first “tweaser.” Then again, our attention spans may not be up to it, particularly if the length of the interactive media we consume continues to shorten at this rate.
Relationships are hard. Friendships take time to build, even if annealed in the heat of a moment. Often they’re situational, forged in school, work, church, or sporting teams, and may fade over time if not renewed regularly.
Online social networking can change that, to a certain extent, but asking people with whom you have weak ties to continually renew them asks a lot. Those with strong ties may tolerate it and continue to follow new accounts, accept requests, correct links or the like. Or even a Like. Until we have an interoperable social graph that can be saved, exported and imported between social networks, we’re wedded to our investments in sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and whatever is coming next, whether it’s Diaspora, Foursquare, Ping or Twitcher. The relationships we build in those networks are the social ties that find, as Professor McAfee put it.
To ground that risk in recent events, my colleague in tech journalism, George Hulme, accidentally deleted his Twitter account this month and has had to ask people to follow the new one. Tough row to hoe, though all of the social capital he’s amassed means he’s already back to 583 follows and 42 lists.
People with weaker ties are unlikely to reconnect unless their interest is sufficiently strong based upon the perceived value of the reconnection. Social karma derives in part from the strength of that past relationship.
I think that’s variably true on the Web, at work or on private social networks. The value of link, follow or fan differs from network to network, as does its permanence. To stop following people on Twitter is much different than to unfriend someone or Facebook or delink on LinkedIn, for instance. In a workplace, where enterprise social software is deployed it could be a huge issue.
These technologies allow us to enrich our networks with many important weaker ties, although sometimes at the cost of investing in reinforcing the stronger ones.
In that vein, I’m looking forward to a family celebration tomorrow where the social circle is as wide as the dinner table, deep as a lifetime and the tweets come from the trees around the patio.
Here’s to being better friends.
UPDATE: Shaun Dakin shared some research in the comments from Paul Adams, a usability researcher at Google, that’s relevant. The Real Life Social Network v2.
“I used to say “justify every pixel,” said Sree Sreenivasan. “Now I say earn every reader.”
Sreenivasan, a dean of student affairs and professor at the Columbia Journalism School, went beyond “what Jeff Jarvis calls the blog boy dance,” offering up more than an hour of cogent advice, perspective and tips on social media to a packed classroom populated by members of the DC Online News Association at Georgetown’s campus in Virginia.
Where once he used to go around newsrooms to talk about email, then Google and blogs, now he’s moved to new tools of digital journalism grounded in a reciprocal relationship between the audience and the reporter. After all, Sreenivasan had to tailor his talk to the audience, a collection of writers, editors and producers already steeped in the tools of digital journalism, moving quickly beyond listing Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to the tools and services that that enable journalists to use those social media platforms improve their reporting, editing and careers.
“The best people find the things that work for them and skip the rest,” said Sreenivasan. Services need to be useful, relevant and extend the journalist’s work. Quoting a student, now at the Wall Street Journal, Sreenivasan observed that you “can have greatest content in world but will die on the vine if we don’t have a way for our readers to find it.” He classified the utility of social media for journalists into four broad categories:
tracking trends on a given beat
connecting with the audience, where ever it is online
putting that audience to work, aka crowdsourcing
building and curating the journalists personal brand
“Tools should fit into workflow and life flow,” he said. “All journalists should be early testers and late adopters.” In that context, he shared three other social media tools he’s tried but does not use: Google Wave, Google Buzz and Foursquare. Sreenivaan also offered Second Life as as an example, quipped that “I have twins; I have no time for first life!”
The new Listener-in-Chief
One group that undoubtedly needs to keep up with new tools and platforms is the burgeoning class of social media editors. Sreenivasan watches the newly-minted “listeners-in-chief” closely, maintaining a list of social media editors on Twitter and analyzing how they’re using the social Web to advance the editorial mission of their mastheads.
He showed the ONA audience a tool new to many in the room, TagHive.com, that showed which tags were trending for a group. What’s trending for social media editors? This morning, it was “news, love, work, today, great, people, awesome and thanks.” A good-natured group, at least as evidenced by language.
The simple answer is yes, in his opinion, but with many a caveat and tweaks to privacy settings. Sreenivasan described the experiences of people in NGOs, activists and other sources whose work has been impaired by associations on social media. To protect yourself and sources, he recommended that Facebook users untag themselves, practicing “security by obscurity,” and use lists. As an example of what can go wrong, he pointed to WhatTheFacebook.com.
Where should journalists turn next for information? Follow @sreenet on Twitter and browse through the resources in his social media guide, which he referenced in the four videos I’ve embedded in this post. He’s a constant source of relevant news, great writing and good tips.
Over the past year, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated by the prevalence of notifications about mayorships and badges on Foursquare or finds on Gowalla.
During the SXSW festival, it grew monumentally worse.
As location-based services (LBS) like Foursquare and Gowalla have picked up users over the past year, many of them have chosen to share their activity on Twitter.
I have a term for that sort of notification, pushed towards followers: “LBS bacn.“
I define LBS bacn as default notifications from location-based services that are autoposted to social networks.
In my view, LBS bacn adds bits and bytes of “datafat” to otherwise useful lifestreams. For those who aren’t familiar with this porktacular digital slang, Wikipedia defines bacn as:
“email which has been subscribed to and is therefore not unsolicited, but is often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as ‘email you want but not right now.’”
“The term was coined in August 2007 at Podcamp Pittsburgh, a social media ”unconference” attended by bloggers and podcasters. The term “bacn” was chosen because of its similarity to spam. Both are popular pork products and both can fill up your inbox pretty quickly. The term “ham,” by way of contrast, is sometimes used to refer to email that a user wants to both receive and read right away.”
Some of Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite or other location-based service post can be useful or entertaining. After all, a location is a relevant response to Twitter’s original question: “What are you doing?” After all, it’s not so far off as an answer to the new question, “What’s happening?” either.
Annotated locations are even interesting, in most cases. One of the best check-ins of that sort pushed to Twitter came from Amy Senger, who tweeted:
But LBS bacn, at least to me on Twitter, is not. As ever, with Twitter everyone’s approach will be different. And if LBS bacn gets too much from a given source, it’s much easier to stop reading it then to give up bacon in the real world: you can just unfollow the bacnator. I don’t hate the idea of a location-based services, or the people that use them, although location-based services do raise online privacy concerns. Everyone will can — and will — use Twitter differently, so don’t please take this as me telling anyone what to do.
I’m just as tired of reading LBS bacn as I am of notifications from Facebook or updates that I have new friends on Friendster. No, Seriously.
The popularity of Zynga’s “Farmville” for among Facebook’s 400 million users is well known. Given 69 million active monthly players, Farmville is bigger than Twitter.
A less publicized statistic is that users of Russia’s top social network, VKontakte.ru, also have a farming application the top social game.
Earler today, I met Nick Wilsdon, a Russian online marketer, by following the #RusTechDel hashtag on Twitter. (In doing so, I was reminded again that #hashtags on Twitter are like channels on cable TV.) I asked Wilsdon if he knew how many unique visitors vKontackte & others receive monthly.
Wilsdon answered with a quick report on vKontackte and Odnoklassniki.ru. According to the statistics he cites, “Happy Farmer” has more than 6 million users and revenues estimated at $200 million dollars per month.
Whether or not gaming addiction is an issue, China’s burgeoning social gaming market shows how popular – and profitable – this phenomenon has become.
As VentureBeat’s reporting on online faming games suggests, there’s a “new agrarian revolution” in China. It’s tempting to summarize a global interest in social gaming on the farm as a common virtue, as millions tend virtual gardens for a few minutes every day across different cultures. It would be lovely if it spoke to yuor shared interest in growing things.
Unfortunately, there’s a dark side to virtual farming parallel to perils of factory farming in the real world: the profit motive.
Some fear that this new social farming revolution may not contribute to the positive development of society. A central feature of social farm games in China is stealing vegetables. Official state media People’s Daily reports that 70 percent of users on Kaixin001 cite it as their favorite feature, and it has even spawned the popular phrase “How many vegetables have you stolen today?”
This key addictive feature has created news stories of business executives “obsessed” with stealing vegetables and broken relationships over vegetables stolen on the night shift. The game is so addictive — with players setting alarm clocks at all hours of the night to check crops — that it “destroys jobs and relationships.”
“Simplicity and stickiness are behind the global epidemic of farm games. Anyone can learn to grow crops within minutes and reap a reward for getting friends — or the entire office — addicted too,” said BloggerInsight Co-Founder Lucas Englehardt.
There’s a business in serving that intense interest, along with providing others a means to slay monsters in World of Warcraft. There’s no small amount of psychology at work behind the incentive structures of these games, as designer look for ways to induce users to spend money on virtual good or services. And, as Michael Arrington pointed out in “Scamville” in TechCrunch last year, the “social gaming ecosystem” can lead to bad behavior.
For good or ill, however, more of us are planting virtual seeds each day.
As the Wall Street Journal reported today, Google’s development team has been working “feverishly” to tweak Buzz privacy settings. Earlier tonight, Google responded to widespreadprivacyconcerns about Buzz, its new social messaging platform.
Google will add a tab specifically for Buzz in Gmail. While Google has not chosen to separate Buzz entirely from Gmail, as many readers thought might be the case after reading a story in SearchEngineLand. Instead, as Danny Sullivan reports there, Google may offer Buzz independently from gmail in the future. This move addresses user experience, creating a clear means to configure the social messaging platform or disable it.
Buzz will no longer automatically connect Google Reader or Picassa. Both of these environments could be limited to closed networks of friends or contacts. When someone wrote “F*** You, Google,” its development team was apparently listening. According to the New York Times story on Buzz privacy settings, Google reached out to the aggrieved user and made changes to address some of her concerns.
Crucially, Google Buzz will move from auto-follow to auto-suggest. Instead of simply connecting a new user to existing gmail contacts, Buzz will now present the user with suggested users from within that social network.
Will it be enough to address the concerns of aggrieved users and convince bystanders to try Buzz? As Neil Gaiman tweeted, “Google DID work late. And DID fix it. I don’t think I’ll ever turn it on now, but good on them.” Or as Jay Rosen put it, “I waited, read the news about Google Buzz, absorbed the accounts and experiences of people I trust, and disabled it before ever opening it.”
Whatever the impact of tonight’s changes, Google has moved quickly to improve the areas of Buzz that have caused such angst online. As Gina Trapani, a self-described “Google fangirl” tweeted, “no doubt Buzz’s privacy issues are seriously problematic, but at least they’re iterating quickly and openly.”
The question that remains is why none of these privacy concerns were clear at the outset. “Google addressed most concerns – good job,” tweeted Evgeny Morozov. “But strange they hadn’t expected the backlash. What were they really thinking?”
Morozov, whose trenchant analysis of the “wrong kind of buzz around Google Buzz,” has been an prominent voice in highlighting the risks of using public social networks for citizens in countries where voicing dissent can carry a death penalty. As he wrote, “I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would never want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to the outside world.”
This change may address that concern, though an “evil genie” may already be out of the bottle if intelligence services have already mined activists’ social networks. It’s not just citizens within authoritarian governments that had much to lose, after all. As danah boyd observed, “automated connections (a la Google Buzz) are particularly dangerous for at-risk populations.” Lawyers have other concerns: exposing clients through email addresses could violate confidentiality agreements.
Another tweak will help a bit with some of the above. As Jason Kincaid wrote at TechCrunch, “private e-mail addresses that were exposed in Buzz @replies are now covered up by asterisks.
That said, Google has now followed Facebook in making a major change to user privacy without testing it first or, crucially, allowing its users to opt out. Instead of making joining Buzz an option, Gmail users were added by default. And the only means users had to disable Buzz completely was akin to a nuclear option: deleting a Google profile.
I haven’t found the algorithmic authority or relevancy in Buzz that I’d expected yet. As Zach Seward tweeted, there’s “something to be said for Google Buzz: When @robinsloan hosts a fascinating discussion, you can link to it.” Buzz support for open data standards may prove to be both disruptive and beneficial for the open Web. Now that I’ve taken steps to hide my contact, I plan to continue using Google Reader to share news to my Google Profile and Buzz to participate in discussions.
That said, this brush with privacy may have tainted the launch of Buzz in much the same way that the death of a luger in Vancouver put a pall over the beginning of the Winter Olympics. Google may have more information about online users that any entity on the planet. By exposing those relationships without offering users the opportunity to opt-out of the new service on launch, the Internet giant has put trust in privacy at risk, an existential worry given that data that Google has about so many.
As Stan Lee put it, “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.” The past week’s backlash has reminded millions of the stakes for such trust.
A few minutes ago, Google Buzz went live at http://buzz.google.com. Google posted a video introducing the Buzz, which ties together Google contacts into a distributed social network accessed through a new tab in Gmail.
In a live webcast on YouTube, Bradley Horowitz (@elatable) explained what Google was after with Buzz: a way to add relevance to the information firehose represented by social messaging and activity. The Web application will act as a user interface to for social data.
Based upon the demo, it will be a snappy app for processing, sharing and annotating images, video and conversations. “Organizing the world’s social information has been a large problem, the kind @Google likes to solve,” said Buzz product manager Todd Jackson, explaining at least some of the why behind the application of algorithmic authority to social media. Jackson writes more in his introduction to Google Buzz at Google’s official blog.
Content shared on Buzz can be posted publicly to a Google Profile (like the one for, say, Alexander Howard) or sent privately within a network. At first glance, the user interface and contrls looks like a Friendfeed clone, with the additional of familiar keyboard shortcuts from gmail and Google Reader. And, notably, Google has adopted the “@reply” convention from the Twitter community as a means of initiating a conversation with contact.
To get a user started with a network, Buzz will autofollow people you’ve emailed. In other words, as Jeremiah Owyang predicted last summer, Google made email into a social network.
Buzz is also mobile.
The mobile Web application, which works on both iPhone and Android, includes geotagging and voice recognition, allowing the user to make spoken updates. While Google profiles will aggregate a user’s Buzz activity, “Places” will aggregate location-based reviews. (In other words, look out Yelp.) A “Nearby” button provides location-based context for Buzz users. Google also launched a new mobile verion of Google Maps, adding a a social layer to its maps. The new “conversation bubbles” on Google Maps indicate geotagged Buzz updates and look like a lightweight, useful version of Twittervision.
Coming soon to the enterprise
Google Buzz will be launched as an enterprise product, says Horowitz. Buzz would likely serve as microblogging layer for Google Apps, providing helpful filtering for the noise of the social Web, unlike Wave, which added it. “A lot of the functionality is inspired by Wave,” said Horowitz, a likely nod to a decision to adopt the best features of the often maligned social messaging platform.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was on hand to share his personal experience with Buzz, offering a preview of how it might be pitched to other business executives or CIOs. “I found a huge amount of productivity from using Google Buzz internally,” said Brin. “I posted [an] OpEd to Buzz. I looked at the broad categories and did a general edit based on that feedback. It was far more efficient.”
Open APIs?
Public feeds are supported as an XML feed and are fully supported by PubSubHub as of today, said another Google exec. By going open API and openly courting developers to join them on Google Code, Google may be after the same fertile ecosystem that surround Twitter.
What does Google Buzz mean?
All of the above gives an idea of what Google’s newest Web application can do and how it might work. Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang has already posted a quick take on what Google Buzz will mean. Key insights:
At the high level, this is a strong move for Google, they continue to aggregate other people’s social content, and become the intermediatry. This helps them to suck in Twitter, Flickr, and any-other-data type as the APIs open up, giving them more to ‘organize’. This is Google acting on its mission to the world.
For consumers, the risk of privacy will continue to be at top of mind. Although the features allow for sharing only with friends or in public. expect more consumer groups to express concern. Overtime, this will become moot as the next generation of consumers continues to share in public.
For consumers, this could potentially have more adoption than Twitter as Gmail has a large footprint Google told me it’s tens of millions (active monthly unique). Of course, most Gmail users likely aren’t Twitter users, but there could be a large platform to draw from.
For Facebook, this is a direct threat, these features emulate Friendfeed and the recently designed Facebook newsfeed. Expect Google to incorporporate Facebook connect, commoditizing Facebook data as it gets sucked into Google and displayed on Google SERP.
For small busineses and retailers, this will impact their search engine results pages, as a single top ‘buzzer’ could cause their content to be very relevant, if that person was relevant, then their influential content could show at top of SERP pages. Expect Google to continue to offer advertising options now around buzz content –fueling their revenues.
Strong, near real-time analysis from Owyang. One area he didn’t dwell as much on is the utility to both businesses and many users of the social Web who want relevance for work or for specific topics, without the noise that often obscures both on Twitter, Facebook or other social networks. Power users have had to evolve many strategies to filter signal from the noise, including shadow accounts, lists, keyword searches or alerts. Google Buzz has the potential to allow over 150 million gmail users to quickly filter the most useful content from the social Web and then selectively share it with either friends, colleagues or the open Web. That action, often termed “curation” in the digital journalism space, is singularly useful.
If Buzz easily enables that activity for mobile users, it will have the potential to massively disrupt the nascent mobile social networking space that currently includes Yelp, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and Foursquare. If users turn to Buzz for reviews, to find who is nearby or what’s being discussed in the neighborhood, Google will also have made Google Maps much stickier, which could in turn make it a more useful platform for contextual mobile advertising. Given the potential for targeted ads based on location to be more useful, that might in turn be of great utility to both users and the search engine giant, though electronic privacy advocates are likely to look at the move with concern.
Will people use Buzz? That’s the multi-million dollar question. Facebook and Twitter own the social Web, as it stands. If Buzz offers a UI that adds relevance, it has a shot. If users find utility in the way that Buzz helps them filter social media from other platform, it could stack up well against Brizzly, Seesmic or similar “social dashboards.”
I’ll keep an eye out for the function to go live in my inbox in the meantime and read TechMeme for other reactions.
What will the rest of 2010 hold for social media? I’m certain will see collaborative technologies be used to cover events and disasters on the real-time Web.
I’m also certain that three issues will dominate the space over the next year:
Identity, Privacy and Security.
Below is an interview where I talk about precisely these issues from Twtrcon:
As you’d imagine, there is no shortage of other opinion on what else the year will hold in social media. For other takes, try:
I suspect the Fortune 500 will go looking for talent to bring in-house, if early adopters aren’t available internally. There’s still a high ceiling — and need — for decent corporate blogs, authentic social media managers and innovative internal implementations of social computing platforms.
Aside from personnel, it’s fun to think about the bigger picture, too. Government is increasingly a big player in this space, as is Google. Social is going to be more mainstream and have more money flow into it than ever before, if marketing investment projections line up.
Here’s hoping that the snake oil is wrung out in the process. I suspect another casualty may be the word “social” itself, as I commented at length on Andy McAfee’s blog. Collaboration and results are in, hype and hysteria are out.
Protecting identity, security and trust will plague adoption of all of these platforms, whether they’re in the public or private space. If we’re giving away our data, social graphs, interactions and transactions, we’ll expect to retain our identities, credentials and privacy. Companies that abuse that relationship will experience viral backlash that beggars the ire we’ve seen to date.
What do you think? What are the trends in collaboration technology that will matter this year?
Kudos to Jeff Pulver and his staff for creating what turned out to be an extraordinary day of discussion and learning, not to mention more than a little music and humor.
I will note, and indeed tweeted, that I was surprised that no one on the Twitter for business panel talked about when NOT to use Twitter, given the legal or compliance issues in regulated industries. I’ll be writing more about that later this trip.
After all, collecting links and ideas from the day from a conference about Twitter from Twitter makes sense, no? I remain sad that I missed the keynotes by @JeffPulver, @Jack, @FredWilson and @TimOReilly that started the day but know that I’ll be able to watch them later and that the hundreds of other attendees here will summarize those words and insights perfectly well for the rest of the Web.
On TV
“Twitter is not cost-prohibitive. @JimmyFallon has 1.3 million followers. He tweeted a Zack Morris pic before the show. That became a trending term before the show aired.”-@GavinPurcell
On Newspapers
Twitter is changing newspapers, both in their relationship to readers and within the newsroom. Editors and writers are collaborating more on news or events, in real-time. As Patrick LaForge (@palafo) said during the panel when he was watching Twitter, he saw a tweet come in that “There’s a plane in the Hudson.” The Village Voice has created a private account to coordinate coverage.
Journalists are receiving tips and sharing news with their followers, engaging in so-called “process journalism.”
On Digital Journalism
JohnAByrne of BusinessWeek shared that perspective, noting that “now journalism” — reporting on news as it breaks and evolves on the real-time Web, is enabled and extended by Twitter. Reporters now use Twitter to report, share & discuss news. The extension of news gathering and sharing into these digital platforms changes it from a product to a process. Indeed, Byrne believes that “Twitter as a collaborative and engagement tool is essential to any kind of forward-thinking journalism.”
A journalist from the Middle East, @moeed, of http://aljazeera.net, stated that “Micro reporting has transformed how we do reporting, particularly in crisis situations, like war.” He shared a number of innovative digital platforms that are enabling Al Jazeera to both disseminate information and to leverage the distributed eyes, ears and phones of people scattered across a region.
Al Jazeera set up a Twitter account specifically for the Gaza conflict: @AJGaza and then fed it back into ALJazeera.net
Chris (@1000TimesYes) of http://RollingStone.com and the @VillageVoice) is reviewing 1000 records on Twitter in 2009. Michael brought down the house, too. He was both hilarious & darkly poetic in bemoaning the death of the music critic.“Crowdsourcing killed punk rock,” in his view, along with many other alternative or indie genres.
On Love, Microsyntax, @CNNBrk, Kodak & Power
Panels and speeches also included the following, all of which you can find commentary and quotes from or about on #140conf:
This was aa tremendous day. The conversation that has been unfolding on the tension between information about events coming in over the real-time Web and so-called “old media” organizations that seek to uphold journalistic standards honed over decades is fascinating. It follows on the blog up…er, blow up between TechCrunch and the New York Times regarding process vs product journalism earlier this month. For journalists, getting the story right, with corroboration, attribution and validity is crucial. Finding a way to do that in the context of the torrent of real-time news will be a central challenge of newsrooms in the month to come.
These are tough questions, debated by the world’s best thinkers on digital journalism and technology. My Twitter conversation with Jason Pontin yesterday lingers: what are the opportunities for distributed, “open source” journalism? Twitter and blogs from #IranElection are a novel source. And as Jason pointed out, we know that there’s misinformation and rumors there; how can journalists do real reporting on Twitter?
Journalists are filing links to pictures and video, which helps — harder to fake the latter — but there are real challenges. As Jason tweeted, “reporting requires verification from at least three sources, posted or printed in an authoritative, independent publication. If I were editing #iranelection stories, I’d want: who is the open source? What conflicting interests? Cross-verification? Open source journalism, appropriately handled, could provide verification.”
It’s possible some technologists in today’s audience or in Silicon Valley, India, Israel or home from MIT for the summer might find a way to provide all of that. For now, I’m looking forward to learning more from the Web luminaries here at the 140 Characters Conference.
My colleague, Elaine Hom, was kind enough to invite me to sit in on her website’s monthly podcast, “Reality Check.” In the episode, I offered up my “Top Twitter tips and the best Twitter tools“
I was well-caffeinated, as you’ll hear, but I’m generally quite proud of the final product. I hope others will find is useful for navigating Twitter in an efficient way and make some meaning out of that noise.
More signs that it’s 2013 and we’re all into the 21st century: Tomorrow at 2 PM ET, the United States Government Accountability Office will answer online questions about a decentralized electronic currency during a livestreamed event. Yes, the USGAO is … Continue reading →
Hillary Clinton has joined Twitter. The former First Lady of the United States, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State joined the conversation with aplomb and humor, thanking the authors of a tumblr blog, “Txts from Hillary,” for inspiration and adopting … Continue reading →
In 2011, I was a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, where I talked with a workshop full of journalists about working within a networked environment for news. As I put together my talk, I distilled the lessons I’d … Continue reading →
This Monday, Minister of Parliament Jeremy Hunt, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Health, delivered a keynote address at the fourth annual Health Datapolooza in Washington, DC. In a rhetorical turn that would be anathema for any national conservative … Continue reading →
This morning, President Obama moved to curb suits from “patent trolls,” entities that many observers of the technology industry have been warning have increasingly been harming innovation across the United States. As it turned out, those concerned parties have been … Continue reading →
A proposed rule on hydraulic fracking from the United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management is now online. As of May 24, the comment period has begun, although the American Petroleum Institue is pressuring Interior to slow down the fracking rule. … Continue reading →
Day by day, we are gaining better maps and tools to navigate the complexities of world around us. The ways that open data is finding its way into the hands of citizens and consumers were described today in a new report from a … Continue reading →
“…a few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who generate it — and offering tools to put it to use,” writes Natasha Singer in the New York Times. “It’s … Continue reading →
Yesterday, Los Angeles city councilman Eric Garcetti won the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Garcetti, at 42, is the youngest LA mayor in half a century and will be the city’s first Jewish mayor. LA’s new mayor is also a former … Continue reading →
“…one of the things we’re doing to fuel … more private sector innovation and discovery,” said President Barack Obama is to make the vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history.” That … Continue reading →
The White House has responded to an e-petition asking the Obama administration to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). "The President has been clear that the United States urgently needs to modernize our laws and practices relating to cybersecurity, both for national security and the security of our country's businesses […]
Given the increasing penetration of technology into the lives of billions of people around the world, context for how we think about intersection of diplomacy and civil society is shifting. No one has been more central to that discussion than Alec J. Ross, the senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who in many ways defined the p […]
Last week, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman launched NYOpenGovernment.com, a new website that his office touts as a means for "voters, the media and government watchdogs to hold state government accountable" by providing the public online access to government data on campaign contributions, lobbying, and state contracts. "Secrecy […]
In the 21st century, federal government must go mobile, putting government services and information at the fingertips of citizens, said United States Chief Technology Officer Todd Park in a wide-ranging interview this week: "That's the first digital government result, outcome, and objective that's desired." To achieve that vision, Park an […]
Code for America is working on a 21st century recipe for urban renewal: Find half a dozen cities struggling to deliver services to citizens in the context of reduced resources. Add a handful of civic coders, a heaping serving of open data and foundation support, start incubating a civic accelerator for startups on the side, and then fold in a brigade of enga […]
The challenges and opportunities presented by the digital revolution continue to disrupt journalism. In an age of information abundance, journalists and citizens alike all need better tools, whether we're curating the samizdat of the 21st century in the Middle East, like Andy Carvin, processing a late night data dump, or looking for the best way to visu […]
A colleague asked me today for a crash course on the "Stop Online Privacy Act" (SOPA). I sent him my feature at the O'Reilly Radar, where I wrote about how Congress is considering anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries and harm digital innovation. The thing is, that post is about 6,000 words long and is now a month out of dat […]
If freedom of expression, privacy and innovation online matter to you, it's time to pay attention to what's happening in Congress right now. There's a gathering storm over bills proposed in the United States House of Representatives and Senate that have the potential to significantly hinder innovation, free speech and cybersecurity on the Inte […]
If you're a developer or entrepreneur and want to help others in that space, you may find a new challenge of interest: Apps for Entrepreneurs. If you're unfamiliar with the idea of challenges, read up on collaborative innovation in open government. The big question that such contests are helping to answer is whether the vision of participatory demo […]
The White House may not quite be up to real-time disclosure, but as the Obama administration continues to step up its online engagement efforts in the real-time political debate online, we can take away some important lessons from the results. The hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington has replicated itself online with both predictable outcomes, like hot rhe […]
The White House wasn’t kidding about posting animated GIFs to its new Tumblr. Earlier today, however, a mechanical engineer named Claudio Ibarra commented on a Google+ thread that he thought that the animated GIF was a “waste.” Is that true? The White House has had a communications staff for a long time. What’s wasted time — [...]
You could spend a long day listing all of the organizations or individuals who are putting government data online, from Carl Malamud to open government activists in Brazil, Africa or Canada. As many conversations in the public domain over the past few years have demonstrated, there are many different perspectives on what purposes “open data” [...]
Putting a dollar value on clean water, stable markets, the quality of schooling or access to the judiciary is no easy task. Each of these elements of society, however, are to some extent related to and enabled by open government. If we think about how the fundamental democratic principles established centuries ago extend today purely [...]
In an age where setting up a livestream to the Web and the rest of the networked world is as easy as holding up a smartphone and making a few taps, the United States Supreme Court appears more uniformly opposed to adding cameras in the courtroom than ever. SupremeCourt.gov provides online access to opinions, orders, docket, court calendars, transcripts, sche […]
On January 10th, 2013, the OpenGov Hub officially launched in Washington, DC. The OpenGov Hub has similarities to incubators and accelerators, in terms of physically housing different organizations in one location, but focuses on scaling open government and building community, as opposed to scaling a startup and building a business. Samantha Power, special a […]
Last September, I gave a 5 minute Ignite talk at the tenth Ignite DC. The video just became available. My talk, embedded below, focused on what I’ve been writing about here at Radar for the past three years: open government, journalism, media, mobile technology and more. The 20 slides that I used for the Ignite were a condensed version of a much longer prese […]
After years of steady growth, open data is now entering into public discourse, particularly in the public sector. If President Barack Obama decides to put the White House’s long-awaited new open data mandate before the nation this spring, it will finally enter the mainstream. As more governments, businesses, media organizations and institutions adopt open da […]
There are few ways to better judge a nation’s character than to look at how its children are educated. What values do their parents, teachers and mentors demonstrate? What accomplishments are celebrated? In a world where championship sports teams are idolized and superstar athletes are feted by the media, it was gratifying to see science, students and teache […]
Creating the conditions for startups to form is now a policy imperative for governments around the world, as Julian Jay Robinson, minister of state in Jamaica’s Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, reminded the attendees at the “Developing the Caribbean” conference last week in Kingston, Jamaica. Robinson said Jamaica is working on deploying w […]
Last winter, around the same time there was a huge row in Congress over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), U.S. Attorney General Holder quietly signed off on expanded rules on government data sharing. The rules allowed the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), housed within the Department of Homeland Security, to analyze the regula […]
When I went to the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival to host a conversation with NPR’s Javaun Moradi about sensors, society and the media, I thought we would be talking about the future of data journalism. By the time I left the event, I’d learned that sensor journalism had long since arrived and been applied. Today, inexpensive, easy-to-use open source hardwar […]
GitHub has been gaining new prominence as the use of open source software in government grows. Earlier this month, I included a few thoughts from Chicago’s chief information officer, Brett Goldstein, about the city’s use of GitHub, in a piece exploring GitHub’s role in government. While Goldstein says that Chicago’s open data portal will remain the primary m […]
When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network. GitHub’s profile has been rising recently, from a Wired article about open source in government, to its high profile use by the White House and within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This March, after the first White House […]
This week, I found that one of my Facebook updates received significantly more attention that others I’ve posted. On the one hand, it was a share of an important New York Times story focusing on the first time a baby was cured of HIV. But I discovered something that went beyond the story itself: someone who was not my friend had paid to sponsor one of my pos […]
Microsoft principal researcher Kate Crawford (@katecrawford) gave a strong talk at last week’s Strata Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. about the limits of big data. She pointed out potential biases in data collection, questioned who may be excluded from it, and hammered home the constant need for context in conclusions. Video of her talk is embedded below: […]
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d5ab6cee-8611-462d-8863-a19cf2e9926c)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5956b370-ccb5-4fc9-bdf2-acdf531e9438)
