While reading an article by Jane Singer in a 1998 issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communications online, I found a reference to Michael Schudson's 1995 book The Power of News. I have read Schudson's Discovering the News (1978), a slim book I consider essential for anyone interested in, as the subtitle states, a "social history of American newspapers." The trouble is that there aren't many places I can get it; it is not in electronic form, and BN.com does not indicate that its local stores have it.  It's only at one place near me -- the Boston Public Library, Central Book Delivery. Which means I can go downtown today in the rain and get it, or go tomorrow on my way home from work, or just search around the Internet for some clues about what's in the book. The book is actually an anthology of essays, and perhaps one of the essays I am looking for is in essay form somewhere else online.

Searching for the book title itself, I found that Meryl Aldridge of the University of Nottingham reviewed the book in 1997. In the paragraph related to the part I am interested in, she includes a direct quote from Schudson:

On the one hand there is no hint that within the study of culture - the field with which he allies himself in the introduction - the relationship between reader and text has been one of the defining issues. Instead he is humorously empirical: "As it happens, not long ago people did listen to literally hours of political addresses ... at antiwar rallies in the 1960s ... I can say from personal experience that there is a big difference between attending a rally and actually listening to the speeches." (p.l91).

I did a search on text from the quote and found a book called Mediamaking, by Lawrence Grossberg, Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney. This passage is indeed present-- but without direct quotes.

As it happens, not long ago people did listen to literally hours of political addresses, interspersed with music, at antiwar rallies in the 1960s. If it is any measure, we can say from personal experience that there is a big difference between attending a rally and actually listening to the speeches.

I did another search on "As it happens, not long ago", a phrase which only appears in 4 other books in Google's Book index. One of them is in Schudson's essay reprinted in a 1999 anthology, Habermas and the Public Sphere. So it appears that Grossberg, Wartella have copied Schudson's words and replaced "I" with "we", claiming the same personal experience in the same words. I suppose one explanation is that one of the book's authors took notes from Schudson (the very next paragraph cites him: "Schudson (1995) notes further...") and another of the book's author confused this for their original content. [I will reserve this space for an explanation from the authors.]

I don't mean to make these charges lightly. But where I else would I air them?

Google Book Search invites users to write a review for books. I do not have a review in mind; I have a question, or rather, a challenge for the authors. In theory, today's tech-hip authors should keep an open forum for answering challenges to their books. In practice, there's little incentive for an author or publisher to put much effort into this. One such example is John Battelle for a book he wrote about Google. I am not a professional scholar, but I felt duty-bound to challenge Battelle after finding numerous problems with his chapter on Google News. Maybe if Google Book Search orchestrated such a forum, authors would be more compelled to respond.

Mostly, I really want to speak to someone familiar with The Power of News, to decided whether it's worth it to haul over to the BPL to read the book. (I will email Schudson now).

UPDATE 6:20pm: Michael Schudson responds:

Thanks for this. I was not aware of it. As it happens, I know all 3 of the MEDIAMAKING authors and two of them have been good friends for many years. So I will take this to be, as you say, a minor transgression that I am not going to worry about. In the world of cut-and-paste research and writing, I expect such things happen more and more often -- in fact, I have worried
more than once about whether I have been guilty about it myself. (I was reading page proofs of a new article last week and found that I had reproduced a string of maybe 8 words verbatim from a New York Times article. The words were pedestrian, words identifying a quoted source, not words that demonstrated anything about the reporter's views, style, anything. Still, it was an inappropriate borrowing and I changed it....but I wonder how many others of the sort I have missed.)

UPDATE Monday: D. Charles Whitney also responded via email:

But this is news? Or even a worthwhile stab at service journalism? If I have my history right, Dave Winer revved his blogging empire because he felt the computer trade press was crap. Dvorak's column does little to convince me that much has changed in the intervening decade.

So I present nine other ways to use Twitter.

1. You don't have to bother with RSS anymore.

Never got the hang of subscribing to RSS "feeds"? Don't bother. Twitter is much easier to read through. If somebody blogs something that they want people to read, they'll put it in their Twitter updates.

2. You don't have to bother with email anymore, either.

Email is so maddening: when you send an email out, you risk forgetting someone. And in return you get spam and bills and mailing lists you don't read. Well, maybe bills are important, and you probably don't want them going through Twitter. But mailing lists, notifications, and personal appeals are all moving to Twitter.

And why send emails yourself? Just have them check your Twitter feed (and/or Facebook).

3. "Sales and Marketing"

Actually, this is one from Dvorak's list. But the depth of his explanation should give pause to anyone  who might think that journalism is about to enter a new golden age: "I am sure people can sell things over the system, which makes eight uses and counting. Lance Ulanoff, PCMag's editor, uses Twitter to sell the publication's columnists and hot stories." So much for the famed crowdsourcing of readers that he spoke of in use #6. When John C. Dvorak is hard pressed to round out a list of 9 items, he asks his editor.

4. Charitable Fundraising

Selling things is so bourgeoisie. It is much more noble pursuit to use one's influence raise money for charity, no? Once upon a time, you'd guilt people into donating by some silly exertion like a walkathon. But why not do something more constructive, and interactive -- like getting people to Tweet about? Proctor & Gamble recently flew a number of digital marketing leaders into Cincinatti to work with in-house marketing folks to sell T-shirts for their Loads of Hope charity. The marketing machine mercilessly flacked this on Twitter and other social media networks in four hours, raising $50,000, which the company matched.

AdWeek's Digital Editor, Brian Morrissey, called it "The feel-good social marketing bribe."

5. It's the fastest global rumor mill ever devised.

Around noon on Monday, Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles had what sounded like the scoop of day "Frequent contributor tells me the New Yorker is considering switch to biweekly or monthly. Recession pains," This spread halfway around the literary world before the magazine's writer Sasha Frere Jones and editor David Remnick smacked it down (the Observer covered this).

6. TweetDeck makes a heckuva an alarm clock.

Tweet, tweet! Chirp, chirp! Leave your computer or iPhone on overnight, and, when your early bird friends awaken with some Twitter tweets, you will, too!

7. You can negotiate your starting salary at a new job.

Last week, a Silicon Valley techie wrote this down: "Got a job offer, but unsure. Maybe-- just maybe-- if they give me five more vacation days to care for my ailing mother, I'd accept it."

Actually, he posted something a little more indiscreet on Twitter; somebody at the company took notice, and he never took the job, anyways. Here are his now-infamous words: "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."

For this Connor Riley has earned the sobriquest "Cisco Fatty." That's probably a bit unfair. He goofed; he fessed up, through his website.)

8. You can get out of jury duty. Or a relationship.

One of the great shared pasttimes in America -- prior to voting for "American Idol" -- is getting out of jury duty. The thrill of voting is tempered by the responsibility of living with the consquences. I helped Norfolk County convict a drunk driver once; I was able to sleep that night after the judge told us he'd have decided in the same way, and was limiting the sentence to probation (Not sure how well I could have sat through the trial of a Southie homicide in 2007. A timely cold kept me off of that one).

If you can convince the court that you're an addicted Twitter user, you may get an early dismissal. As John Schwartz reported in last week's Times, a couple of trials have invited appeals over jurors' use of Twitter. Of course, Twitter is only a gateway drug. Jurors' use of Google has caused a mistrial.

As for the relationship, see the breaking news on Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer. Breaking, indeed: Mayer preferred time with Twitter to time with Aniston.

9. Twitters are rainbow-colored, fruit-flavored, and crunchy and chewy at the same time!

Oh wait, I think I meant skittles.

10.  The rich get richer.

(We're at ten because I added one of Dvorak's. Not because we're counting. But this is one where math is crucial).

On Facebook, Robert Scoble maxed out at five thousand friends, which kinda limited his reach. The average person could spend years on on Facebook without even knowing that the Scobleizer existed. Twitter has no practical limit to followers, so it is scale-free, and the power law takes full effect. On Twitter, Scoble has seventy-four thousand followers. I'm still not sure what purpose Robert Scoble serves on the Internet-- he couldn't even get Microsoft SharePoint to implement RSS decently-- but he still has double the number of followers of Jeremiah Owyang, a bonafide research analyst for Forrester, a paid expert. And I still don't know what the Jeremiah Owyang knows -- he didn't know that airlines have advertising! Forty of his readers pointed out contrawise after he let that slip while presumably boarding a plane (To his defense, he reported having done a lot of work when he landed, so he may not notice these things).

And here's what great about Twitter for power users: no one will know that Owyang misspoke! Unlike the blogs, where comments are generally visible, on Twitter they get scattered throughout. (see Jeremiah Owyang, your tweeters know more than you)

The real lesson here is that every single one of John Dvorak's uses of Twitter depends on one key factor: yield. My rough guess is that you'd be extremely lucky if out of 100 followers, 10 actually read it and 1 responds (I invite social media analysts to provide real data for this, which they surely have access to more than I). Since Dvorak has 47,000 followers, by yield alone he is able to get hundreds of responses to anything he says.

In other words, the average brain flam of an A-Lister will likely get an order of magnitude more interest than the most erudite post of the bottom 95% of Twitter users who have less than 200 followers. This is variously called the Power Law, the Pareto Principle, and the Matthew Effect ("The Rich Get Richer"). People follow Scoble or Owyang or Dvorak not because they are exemplar observers of the social scene, but mostly because other people follow them. This is not they are fraud , any more than saying that New York City is unaccorded of its own popularity, but careful readers should keep that it mind.

(And this will remain this way until consensus comes along to implement a priority system).

And I'm sorry-- if a highly respected tech columnist isn't aware of that-- than he really doesn't know jack about information.

Well, that's my rant, and you've been reading wordplay. Off to help some nonprofits do fundraising via social networking. :-)

This is what I know is out there today:

• Positive: Delicious, Furl, Twitter, Facebook, Twine, NYTimes TimesPeople, IBM/Lotus Connections Dogear all assume that all links in the system are positive.
• Positive-and-Negative: Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg have support for "voting down"
• Likert scales: Newstrust uses these for multiple categories. This is too abstract and time-consuming for most users.

Delicious and other free-tagging services get around this by letting the user supply their own tags, which may be adjectives. This is unfortunate, because quality is just the sort of metric you want to aggregate across different users. So a controlled vocabulary is desired.

This is a refinement on my ViewPoints model (2004). I had designed ViewPoints with discussion threads in mind, and made it overly didactic. ViewPoints feedback could be re-organized in terms of positive, negative, or remedial feedback. Whether you choose to give negative or remedial ratings often depends on how much you want to help the author and/or whether the author is seeking input.

I've reserved unique letters for each, as well as suggested a symbolic notation.

Positive scale
+ Interesting: Pleasant, humorous, enjoyable, or otherwise needs further
++ Helpful: Provides utility for problem solving
+++ Enlightening: Deeply informative about a given topic
++++ Fundamental: Read it now. Will change the way the way you think.

Negative scale
- Disappointing: Not very interesting
-- Unhelpful: I have no idea where I can apply this
--- Redundant: I've heard this before.
---- Troubling: Will change the way people will think, in a bad way, and should be avoided.

Remedial scale
/ Confusing: Minor flaws.
// Overwrought: Too long; could say the same with less.
/// Lacking: Missing information.
//// Poor: Needs major rework.

Of course, this chestnut rings hollow unless the reporter (a), has the means to display the comments from their readers or (b), acknowledges the readers that set him straight, or (c) genuinely dispatches with the know-it-all attitude and puts his ignorance in the form of questions to readers. As Jay Rosen clarified in a 2004 interview: "It's not just, 'My readers know more than I do.' It's, 'My readers know more than I do and I can tap that because they will tell me.'" (see my Post Facto Editing for more on this.)

Weblogs were a big help in that they provided a mechanism for displaying comments forum for the reporter to ask questions before publishing a story. Because the responses are organized publicly, the initator generally has the social pressure to respond & acknowledge.

In this manner, Twitter is a step backwards. Neither Twitter.com interface nor the popular Tweetdeck desktop application organizes the responses to posts (FriendFeed claims to do this, but only if the responses is through FriendFeed. Facebook effectively does it though). In other words, if some readers respond, many others readers will never know.

Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester research analyst in social media, mused earlier on Sunday on Twitter that "given the state of the airline industry, I'm surprised we don't see ads inside of the airplane like public buses and trains." He has 37,000 followers on Twitter, and over forty responded within the hour. Three had forwarded his comment via a retweet. Nine begged him not to give the airlines any ideas. And thirty followers (including me) informed him that there was indeed advertising on commercial airlines-- on movies/televisions, in-flight magazines, and, on a number of carriers, on seatbacks.

Most importantly, somebody sent an answer within two minutes. But Owyang has disappeared from Twitter for the subsequent six hours (it is Sunday, after all), so more redundant answers keep trickling in. It's not his fault that every utterance of flam causes a ripple amongst some sizable yield of his 37,000 readers, but at some point he (and other Twitter power users) have to realize what a mess they have wrought. He is, after all, presenting himself as a Twitter expert. "Engage in dialog, ask questions and answer others questions using the reply feature," he counsels.

When Owyang logs in to Twitter next, he'd probably love to see an organized grouping of answers such as below. But he won't, because the Twitter.com interface won't do it for him. Nor will TweetDeck. (LinkedIn is a far better place to ask a serious question).

[Why I have singled out J.O.? For the same reason I picked on a Forrester report in January (see Beyond Blogging). Forrester Research is the industry leader. That my employer pays sums of money to his employer is irrelevant; I don't even know how much we pay. J.O. probably makes many more observations over the course of the year on far weightier matters, and I assume somebody else is keeping score of how good his advice is .I am merely following Dan Gillmor's dictum of the reader "knowing more" than the apparent expert, and trying to find out what the expert says in return. I've been playing this game for a long time now. I've responded to J.O. over tweets before, but the only time I got an response from him was when I emailed him.]

One last point: the original question actually suggests at some fundamental points on advertising. There are, roughly, two places to put advertising: cultural expressions (newspapers, magazines, radio, television, athletes, performing arts, events) or architectural expressions (billboards, buses). Every ad on a billboard is one that doesn't go in a daily newspaper. Ads on in-flight magazines at least support journalists. If companies fully exploit mobile phone advertising to subsidize users directly, that is less money supporting traditional journalism.

Response: It already exists

• fiberartisan: @jowyang you mean like the ones on JetBlue - including the free samples? ;-)
• rgruia: @jowyang I guess you don't watch movies while you're on a plane ;-) Hey, Ryanair is considering charging for using the washroom ;-)
• ronchung: @jowyang they do have inflight magazines with ads. And they want you to buy in flight duty free.
• kbrazel: @jowyang You haven't been on a plane with the seatback video screens. Lots of ads!
• michaeljbarber: @jowyang when was the last time you flew @usairways? They have ads on sick bags & tray tables.
• JodiEchakowitz: @jowyang They just throw the ads at u on their personalized tv screens. It's more than enough!
• michaeljung: @jowyang low cost airlines here in europe have that, like easyjet and ryanair and airberlin. Seen that, flew with them.
• JonGarfunkel: @jowyang Surely in all your travels you must've picked up the airline magazines from the pouch in front of you, no? *T0
• michaeljbarber: @LorenMcDonald @jowyang Yep it is annoying. "Welcome to Phoenix. Did you know you could be earning miles with the USairways credit card" arg
• michelthigpen: @jowyang They are indeed, creeping up slowly (Scandinavia).. check this out http://bit.ly/196AOA (expand)
• victorzapanta: @jowyang When I flew US Airways in January, my tray was plastered with an ad for Patrick Swayze's show. Horrified: http://twitpic.com/2ctwv
• giero: @jowyang I've actually seen those, believe it was either Easyjet or Transavia that had ads on the overhead luggage compartments... :-/
• johnpeavoy: @jowyang You've obviously never flown Ryanair ;-). They have ads all along the o/h bins in their 737s....
• LorenMcDonald: RT @michaeljbarber: @jowyang when was last time U flew @usairways? They have ads on sick bags & tray tables LM: they also push credit cards
• TiffanyStarnes: @jowyang Some airlines have tray table ads. Did a campaign with plates of food a few years back for tourism client. http://twitpic.com/2cu21
• chasnote: @jowyang Have you seen Sea World ads on overhead bins on Southwest?
• Crowdsourcing: @jowyang : I had ads on the pull-down food trays on a Europe flight last year. Maybe it was KLM?
• claudiomartins: @jowyang this has been happening for a while here in Brazil. you've no option but to see adds on the front seat and on the LCD screens.
• jennselke: @jowyang I think it is only a matter of time before airline trays and seatbacks have advertisements on them
• ajmunn: @jowyang RE Ads on Airlines. Indeed was thinking of internal entertainment channels with ads, or now online services through portal with ads
• kevinaschenbren: @jowyang I noticed a lot of ads during the inflight movies on my last intl flight. Each of the on-demand programs had ads up front.
• kevinaschenbren: @jowyang Plus there are the inflight mags that are basically ads with snippets of advertorial content.
• anettenovak: @jowyang we have them here, sas and ryanair sell the space on the back of your traytable.
• bncarvin: @jowyang Last time I travelled their WERE ads in the plane. They were on the top of the tray table.
• stefanomaggi: @jowyang in Europe on most low cost airlines (e.g. easyjet, ryanair) we see ads very similar to ones on busses
• Chris_Hoskins: @jowyang obviously you've never been on a ryanair flight!
• rickwilliams: @jowyang RyanAir in the UK have been doing this for some time.
• MyMelodie: @jowyang when I flew (I believe American Airlines) in Sept there were Verizon Wireless ads on all the seat trays!
• claudiomartins: @jowyang Visa, Mastercard, PWC, Shell... all advertisers...

Response: Don't give the airline companies ideas!

• lrobiner: @jowyang how about sponsored oxygen masks?
• beretta627: @jowyang don't give them any ideas!
• heythatguymark: @jowyang Don't say that too loudly, sir....you never know who's listening...lol.
• swoodruff: @jowyang With the national deficit we're going to run, perhaps soon you'll the see Pepsi Air Force One..
• tudor_ciurescu: @jowyang don`t worry my friend, this is next :D :)
• jdcoffman: @jowyang Don't give them the idea! I'm sure it's been researched
• ElspethMurray: @jowyang Hmm - interesting thought. Not that I'd welcome ads on planes, but yeah, I know what you mean.
• cheeky_geeky: @jowyang Do you think a Burger King ad on the back of the airplane seat in front of you would encourage a purchase at the airport? Maybe!
• beauche: @jowyang hey, now.... don't give the airlines any ideas. being locked in a seat, they could beam audio/video driven ads to a forced audience

Re-tweeters:

• fsalasnyc: RT @jowyang given the state of the airline industry, I'm surprised we don't see ads inside of the airplane like public buses and trains
• rochecr: RT: @jowyang: given the state of the airline industry, I'm surprised we don't see ads inside of the airplane like public buses and trains
• AlanEggleston: RT @jowyang: given the state of the airline industry, surprised we don't see ads inside of the plane like public buses and trains (Shhhhh!)

First, is Facebook's redesign of two weeks -- the so-called twitterization -- a bad thing? These are the sorts of data that would be helpful in evaluating the change:

• Number of people invited to join, before & after
• User activity on the site, before & after
  
• User time spent on Facebook, before & after
  
• Polling of a random sample of Facebook users
  

Nobody has this data but Facebook; some outside group could trouble with a random poll, but why bother? Facebook has this data, and it's understandable that it might be too soon to release it. They can wait for a month, after they quietly make improvements and the hysteria subsides.

The hysteria

The hysteria? Countless Facebook groups, blog posts, twitter tweets griping about the change. But Facebook users are a fickle bunch. Justin Smith edits the group blog Inside Facebook, for an audience of facebook developers and advertisers; his opinion certainly should carry some weight. Considering the change, he noted last week that every major Facebook change in the past has been followed by mass protests -- and then, mass acceptance. He concluded: "the loudest voice will be the way users actually change the way they use the service. We wouldn’t be surprised to see time spent and pages per visit increase similarly over the coming year - but the data will tell the tale."

But amongst the hyster-o-sphere, I've yet to find anything that specifically itemizes what is wrong and, more important, why it is irreparable without going to the old interface. Tim O'Reilly, head of the eponymous computer publishing empire, posted on Twitter that Dare Obasanjo, a Microsoft program manager and prominent blogger,  "nails what is wrong with the new Facebook design." But Obasanjo's blog post is not complaining about the design, but rather about Facebook's corporate strategy.

Indeed, founder Mark Zuckerberg (according emails leaked to ValleyWag) betrayed his youth in mangling the concept of "distruptive technologies" and snidely dismissing the concerns of users. What he could have said, more diplomatically, is that customers focus on short-term needs, and the company best understands long-term needs (and it's possible he did, and the quotes we're getting have been ripped from context.)

Should we even pay attention to the polling app that says that 94% of Facebook users polled are giving it a thumbsdown, even if that 94% represents a million users? No, not even if Michael Arrington of the influential TechCrunch blogs about it. This is a joke of poll: it only asks users thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and does not drill down into specific concerns. The demographic data that a Facebook app could access-- and which could help make this more of a scientific poll -- is unused.

What the change means

Facebook obviously realized that Twitter was getting insanely popular. And it was easier for Facebook to provider Twitter functionality than vice-versa.

Facebook needed to centralize the status/link/note posting to make it easier to do. It is now, and it's much friendlier than Twitter.

As to the people "who can't find anything anymore," they need to explain what they can't find. I hear the same complaint from people struggling with Office 2007, and that's just a transition thing.

Indeed there are some specific problems with the design. The 160-character limitation has suddenly been thrown at users: when you enter a link, your description can be 160 characters and no longer. This is an obvious nod to twitterization. But this is one of the most glaring limitation of Twtter. And it now annoys users because they see no reason for it. It would be fair to show users where the 160-char cutoff is in the text entry box, so they can format their text appropriately. Encourage, but don't mandate, brevity.

People are complaining about the increasing levels of noise-- more seemingly irrelevant posts from friends. This is bound to happen in any communications system, and especially now that Facebook has made it easier to post updates. I gave it a name last week: flam (with the backronym Friends' Lovingly Annoying Messages). Flam is like spam, but it comes from your friends (or PR agencies), and there is no ill intent implied. Both Facebook and Twitter need to recognize what flam is, and then explain how they can help users mitigate it.

The Bigger Change Ahead

Obviously, Facebook should give the appearance of caring. What they should do is work harder answering specific questions. Facebook indeed has a page listing questions about the change. It lists just ten addressing how to do things (and two more addressing why). Certainly this can be made more dynamic and interactive -- a question a day (or an hour?), addressing specific user concerns.

They need to do this in order to prepare for the real tidal wave:

Ad toleration.

The trick for any commercial channel is to introduce sponsorship at a level that users can tolerate. On Twitter, commercial voices have joined the fold slowly and steadily. The commercial use of Twitter has been welcomed by virtue of Twitter's A-List being heavily concentrated with social media marketers. This has paved the way for commercial accounts (such as Dell, Zappos) to offer coupons through Tweets, and this gets celebrated as an exemplary use of Twitter. Still it's not all smooth sailing: a social media charity drive by Proctor & Gamble for Tide detergent was dismissed by Silicon Valley Watcher's Tom Foremski, who called it a "human botnet" and AdWeek's Brian Morrissey, who called it a "feel-good social media bribe."

Facebook has an even tougher challenge. They have long established promotional accounts that they call Pages I call faves (entities that you follow, but don't follow you). But they have long held off allowing these Pages to promote through users' news feeds. Facebook announced in the recent redesign that they're going to introduce this shortly. Users are now complaining about how to deal with the apparent increase in flam from their own friends. Now they're going to be asked to tolerate the ads.

I don't have a solution for Facebook's deployment strategy. But I do have one for users. My friends (and faves), we are constantly complain about a world of information overload. But Facebook is only the medium. It's really coming from us: you and me. What we need to do is enable us and our friends to properly markup what we feel is important for our network from that which isn't. I call this Semantic Social Media Construction. It's up to Facebook, Twitter et al to implement this. But we at least need to know what to ask for-- and stop crying about layout upgrades, for heaven sakes.

This came up in a small interest group I met with this evening; our consensus was that this was a largely invisible issue amongst our professional peers. I only supposed that the occasional Law & Order episode isn't enough to raise people's consciences. Data is needed: regular, reliable, & ready data.

These questions are what we can call Social Health Indicators: foreclosed houses: violent crime rate; high school drop out rate, number of shelter beds available etc. Some of these stats are generally collected by the government, and shared with advocacy agencies, who publish reports and release them, and the general press writes an article around that. And then people remember some salient statistic, or not, and it goes out of date.

Here's what I have in mind. For a given social health indicator:

• Guide users to form the right question
• Have a feed which provides that data on demand
• Have a widget, Facebook app, or iPhone app render that data

There's an existing precedent. I would venture to say that the most prolific producer of data in the country bar none is the National Weather Service. And their National Digital Forecast Database provides a full suite of SOAP interfaces for any of this data to be automatically fed. You may have a weather forecaster on your desktop, browser toolbar, or certainly your favorite portal, and that's all because the NWS is committed to getting that information out in the most reliable & efficient way possible.

In that spirit, here's my wild M&A prediction to happen in the next 12 months: eBay buys Twitter. (Why bother with TwitPay, when you can the cow...) It makes no less sense than eBay buying Skype. And they do this to go after the 900 pound gorilla, el Goog.

Disclaimer: I'm making this up as I go along, based on my own observations, superstitions, hypotheses. I don't claim to the ... but anybody who does, should offer a clearer scenario.

First, if Twitter scoops up one or two URL shorteners, they can potentially intercept every link out to a popular news source. No, you wouldn't intercept links to obscure blogs, but they would do it to with anyone large enough to cut a deal with. Or maybe the newspaper does it on their own (as WashPost, Salon, Forbes do). Twitter just gets around to streamlining this messy process.

There was a lot of irrationality about the paywalls that the NYT had thrown up. Well, people are going to hate adwalls even more when they become common as print revenues start to recede. News sites like any retail outfit, would like its visitors to get in the habit of staying around, and becoming regulars. Those one-hit readers are going to have to pay, with their time.

And here's where PayPal comes into play -- combined Twitter account, you make it very easy for a user to pay to get through that adwall. As I illustrated it 18 months ago in PaperTrust: make newspaper subscriptions count for something. If you're a paying subscriber, you'll be able to bypass intrusive ads. You'll be able to get stories in single-page format by default. And what else is in for the newspaper.com?  Oh, the social demographic data that users haven't been sharing with it.

All of a sudden, Google News as the prime mediator is threatened! Yes, indeed, people will go to Twitter or Facebook to get their news links from their friends.

Sure, the usual suspects will cry about the paywalls again. So we'll throw them a bone too The tip jar will be vastly simplified when it all goes through a single funnel. The reader tips the source a few cents, and eTwitBayPal gets a cut. New media mavens like Clay Shirky will have to stop writing dreck like Why Small Payments Won't Save Publishers, but they will write stuff like Why Small Payments Will Help Authors, and if it's really any good, readers will pay them. Links & retweets will be no longer be the currency of authority; the currency of authority will be, well, currency.

I have no clue whatsoever if this will happen; particularly as I have zero insight into the VC world. I am just rather tired of the new media gurus writing off the reading public as a bunch of cheap bastards who would never pay a dime for online news. I don't know if anyone had foreseen the market for secondhand junk and virtual storefronts. eBay became the clearinghouse for that. It could happen to news as well.

This thought reached me following an effort by Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff to audit all the PR email he was receiving. He counted 114 emails in the last two weeks of January; for each message, he analyzed what research area it addressed, whether a human had consciously sent it to him in particular, and how easy it was to unsubscribe. He concluded that three-quarters of the PR email he received was irrelevant. He did everything but give it a name. Without a name, it's difficult to get others track the problem, let alone suggest remedies for it.

I hereby call it flam. Backronym: Friends' Lovingly Annoying Messages. Well-intended (lovingly) but otherwise off-topic (annoying). (With apologies to the village in Norway by the name of Flåm. It looks charming; I hope to visit sometime.)

It's not merely a problem with PR agencies, or with email for that matter. The new frontier of communications on the Internet is status messages: brief notes, often with hyperlink. Twitter popularized this; Facebook realized from Twitter's success that status message updates were their under-utilized resource, and this past week re-tooled its web interface to encourage their use. Just like an email inbox, users now see a stream of status updates from Facebook or “tweets” from Twitter. What makes flam economical is the same as for spam: there is no monetary cost for a sender to reach more users. (Unlike spam, every piece of flam is the result of an “opt-in” relationship). There is, of course, the cost of attention,: the subscriber must spend increasing amounts of time scanning messages, or risk missing some. Or they can just drop the most flammy of their friends.

This has ramifications as more people turn to status messages, not just for personal communications, but for their professional lives as well. I will address some solutions below. First I wanted to explain how I came up with the term.

Etymology

“Spam” is a word of amazing economy. It is it is one letter removed from scam / sham. It has inspired anti-spam software, the CAN-SPAM legislation, and quickly made the jump from jargon to language. The New Oxford English Dictionary added it in 1998.

In 2007, some computer users in Pittsburgh at the PodCamp conference sought a word to indicate the automated emails that come from services like Facebook; they kept with the porcine metaphor and chose “bacn.” This even reached the New York Times as a buzzword for 2007, but it hasn't caught on very well in common language. Bacn doesn't easily conjugate to a verb (as spam has). While Hormel-brand SPAM is just as much an esoteric cultural artifact as it processed ham, the most common connotation of “bacon” is that it's on the breakfast menu. The website of bacn.com is used by enthusiasts of the food; the promoters of “bacn” had to settle with bacn2.com. The posted four posts to the blog in three days and effectively abandoned it thereafter. They listed no description of the problem, let alone any solution.

Ironically the problem, as originally stated, got the very thing we're solving here: “how some people we know twitter so much we have to turn off notifications for them.” That may have well solved the email problem, but it doesn't solve the problem of having one's Twitter feed clogged!

I wrote Josh Bernoff after he released his report last month to see if he he could suggest a name for the term. He suggested “pram” since he wanted to emphasize the PR nature. I suggested “spim” because it sounded like a weakened spam, as well as the word spin (also a PR connotation). I since learned that spim has already been used for spam-like, unsolicited IM messages. But, as above, I didn't think this problem was particular to the PR industry.

Cram? Possibly, the image of squeezing something in a tight space seemed to fit what I was after. Of course, cramming already has connotation in popular culture: studying all night before an exam – squeezing as much knowledge into your short-term memory as you can. Cramming and slamming were also adopted a decade ago by the phone industry to describe the practice of adding phone charges, and switching phone providers, respectively. (A common practice by competitive carriers after the 1996 Telecom deregulation; the incumbent carriers very swiftly were able to pass laws against this and.)

Tsam? I got this by taking the word ending of flotsam and jetsam, the junk from ships floating at sea. But TS- is a most unusual combination to start a word with; almost all of the words in English that do are from a foreign language (tsar, tsunami, tsetse, tzadik). Not that being of apparent foreign origin hurt the adoption of “wiki,” but nonetheless, I didn't think a foreign-sounding would catch on. And I couldn't come up with an easy backronym.

So I got back to flam. It sounds like flan, the tasty crème caramel dessert from Spain. Tasty, fluffy, yummy – but all in moderation! A flimflam is a confidence game – though it avoids the harsh sound of scam (flip, flap, fluff, flight, flake – these words all suggest levity). Rex Stout's fictional detective Nero Wolfe regularly favored “flummery” as an idiom to mean nonsense. And, as noted before, the backronym: Friends' Lovingly Annoying Messages. Flam it is.

I did pause to consider that the gerund form “flamming” looks like a misspelling of flaming, the old Internet pasttime of harassing someone online. A research paper from Patrick O'Sullivan and Andrew Flanagin of Illinois State provides a helpful examination of the practice. They suggest that the truest example of a flame is where sender intends to insult the recipient, and the recipient and third party perceive it as such. I am well aware that disruptive and injurious speech persist online (see Categories of Harmful Speech Online), but I sense it is becoming more the exception than the rule. The pre-social Internet of “no one knows you're a dog” ethos featured lots of anonymous users, and many others with unknown reputations (IT professionals, college students, etc.). It was easy to flame then and wreck civilized discourse. On today's social Internet, you often know very well whom you're talking with– their professions, their peers, their pets. Flamers used to dominate Usenet channels and bulletin boards. People moved elsewhere to more controlled forums. More conversations happen in blog comments, in which blog publishers have a lower tolerance for attacks. Twitter has ad hoc channels, but reputations are known, and violators are subject to a centralized code of conduct.

In other words, flaming will be yielding to flamming as a central communications problem of the Internet.

Problem & Solution

The flam rate is the amount of unimportant messages from a sender . If the rate is too high, you stop paying attention, and you unsubscribe.

On Facebook, you have reciprocal relations with all of your linked friends. You might have more common interests, and less flammery material. In addition, under the new design, you effectively unsubscribe from a flammy friend's updates – without sacrificing your friend connection.

Twitter was a bit innovative in tossing out reciprocity. You can follow people without them following you. Oddly, Twitter has never straightened out the terms for this. The inverse of follower is given as a following, which doesn't quite sound right: there is no plural. Hubspot's State of the Twittersphere Q4 2008 reveals that 88% of people have less than 100 “Number Following.” This is linguistically confounding, since it easily can be confused for “Number of Followers.” I would humbly suggest “fave” and use it here. You have followers, and you have faves (people you follow). If you have a reciprocal relationship, it can be described as a friend in the Facebook sense.

Therefore, flam can just as well stand for “Faves' Lovingly Annoying Messages.” Each status has meaning to the sender, but not to ever reader. The updates from a fave in an airport are meaningless to most followers, unless you are in the destination city as the traveler and would like to meet him or her (I have joked that someone should assemble a compilation book titled Idlewild: Bloggers and twitter users passing the time at airports.)

The flam problem doesn't just annoy current users. It also prevents people from joining a service in the first place. A recent poker gathering with some friends drew the sort of improper Bostonians crowd that Twitter would love to have aboard: technology workers, early adopters, VC advisors, iPhone users. None saw any particular compelling benefit to Twitter; all were under the impression that it would be a new stream of off-topic messages to deal with.

My long delay in adopting Twitter (17 months) was based on the fact that Facebook was superior in defining a rich vocabulary of updates (beyond status, users post events, photos, links, etc.). Granted, once I joined Twitter I realized that I could follow faves that weren't necessarily my friends. I could follow many more faves than I had ever done over RSS. I'd happily subscribe to a company or charity's Twitter feed if I never got another email or paper mail from them.

I just have one caveat: they need to construct their posts in a way that can help me address the flam problem. In Semantic Social Media Construction, I describe how different types of semantic updates could be coded. In Star Priority Notation, I provide some implementation examples for use in Twitter. (These will remain unused until greater appreciation for flam problem comes about). I'd also like to get set a threshold for how many updates in a day I get from a particular sender, lest my message inbox gets flooded with their flam. Asking them to self-prioritize their notes would drive which of those actually I get to see. Event planned? Yes. Something you've written? Yes. Something you're linking to? Maybe. You're in an airport? Only if you're going to be in the city I'm in.

Recognizing flam and keeping score will help – the trust problem. With the social internet, we have less worry about trusting people to give us reliable information; we have the freedom and ability to check multiple source. The question is whether we trust them with our time. The best measures we have on the Internet for gauging popularity (Google for websites, Technorati for blogs; Twitter Grader) are solely functions of popularity. The power law taxes effect: people follow channels simply because other people are following them. Including a measure along the lines of a flam rate might help readers make better decisions as to whom to follow.

This model grew out of an effort of mine with John Cass to define a measure for social media practices. We agreed that it was a good idea to look at social media maturity in general, though this has been tackled by others (see models from from RD2, from Rachel Happe). I wanted to limit the scope of my effort. First, the many voices suggest that social media is a means, not an end. I wanted to focus on the end objective. Second, the end objective I had in mind was specifically about community enablement. Much of the focus on social media is for sales, marketing, and brand building. I leave that for others.

Obviously, the true test of a model is how it is used. I don't have the time myself to go through and evaluate communities, but I would like, with others' help, to start.

Introduction

Core Processes

The core processes are defined as such:

1. Problem Resolution – Process of identifying problems and resolving them.

2. Content Sharing – Process of creating knowledge from information, publishing it, and refining it.

3. Innovation Pipeline – Process of creating new ideas for the future inclusion in product or service.

Social networking is at present omitted from the core processes, it may be an input or an output to them. (Do people collaborate better because they have built social relations, or visa versa? Or a little of both?)

Derivation of the Name

Open Community – This refers to a community of practice. It can be commonly referred to as a user community or developer community. It is similar to customers or clients, but the use of “community” implies that the users can collaborate on their own. The term “customer” is not used to avoid the business connotations. Open was added emphasize the ability of any stakeholder to join, and also to distinguish it from CEM.

Enablement – The community is enabled, to do a job. Community empowerment is implied, though this often is a political statement of the balance of power.

Model – This is used to denote a framework. (Similar conceptual frameworks use 'M' for Management.)

Other Models

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has coalesced as a framework for orchestrating customer service. It is insufficient for OCEM for a couple of fundamental reasons. It traditionally deals with customers as individuals, and not as a community. Second, CRM is often sales-driven.

Customer Experience Management (CEM or CExM) was a reaction to CRM; it's been positioned as a more holistic approach. There is no general-purpose CEM software. It is not a technical standard for evaluating software; it is more commonly used for evaluating a company's holisitc processes-- from a customer point of view. Forrester expert Bruce Temkin cites Jeff Bezos telling Business Week's Heather Green: "Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don't need to contact [anyone]." (In other words, the company's core businesses!)

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is an emerging framework that seeks to be a reciprocal to CRM: empowering customers to manage their experience with the vendor.

Community Relations is a business function that is largely unrelated and does not have a formal model behind it. A business's office of community relations interacts with the leaders of the local community (government/charity/education officials).

Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a name suggested by Yochai Benkler as an umbrella term for open source software and similarly-inspired projects (Wikipedia, etc). Indeed, community enablement is almost part-and-parcel with such projects, though the oCEM processes aren't always systematized. Moreover, being strictly open source should not be required for oCEM adherence.

In addition, models are often inferred by work of industry analysts (cf. Forrester Community Platforms and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software) These efforts are helpful but ultimately inadequate for a couple of reasons: first, they focus on the software makers as business suppliers, and do not provide special focus on the process architecture itself; second, they do not offer a model for evaluating how effectively social software / community platforms are adopted.

Evaluation

An OCEM evaluation can be run against these entities:

• Software
• Product Vendors
• Internal departments

Internally, each of these pillars can be evaluated against CMM levels. An outside party (the community itself) can assign an openness rating as well:

1. No formal system.
2. Closed system for limited partners/customers.
3. Open, but Limited interactivity (moderation).
4. Full interactivity.
5. Managed interactivity -- top users are promoted, abusers are demoted.

Details

A. Problem Resolution

“Give a man a fish”

Problem Resolution is the basic operation of customer service.

Tools: Combination of CRM tools, online forums, Twitter monitoring.

Metrics: Mean time to response; mean time to solution; open issues per community member.

Openness: Web-Based discussion forums allow for community investigation and resolution. Twitter monitoring allows for real-time responses.

Challenges: Closed and open forum processes are often managed separately; duplication of issues. Open forums is generally seen as "unofficial support" and not measured.

B. Content Sharing

"Teach a man to fish"

Content Sharing is akin to Knowledge Management: the process of recognizing useful information and publishing it in an open, searchable forum.

Tools: Online manual with customer comments; and/or managed wiki.

Metrics: how many answers are found in the corpus; how rapidly errors in the documentation are corrected, how many new documents are added.

Openness: Allowing multiple parties to document makes the changes speedier.

Challenges: A blog is often used, but is often used for marketing purposes; a managed wiki could be better.

C. Innovation Pipeline

"Listen to the man's ideas on fishing..."

Tools: Forums can be used. salesforce.com IdeaExchange.

Metrics: how quickly ideas are productized (by vendor or partner)

Openness: The community can also productize ideas, not just the vendor.

Challenges: Taxonomy is needed to align ideas with management model.

Evaluation

This is how an outside analyst can perform evaluations:

• Evaluating a community software package. Does it support each process? For each process, what metrics does it collect?
• Evaluating an organization. Does it implement each process? For each process, how open is it? How mature is it, is it being measured & optimized?

Remember that oCEM is ultimately focused on the core processes and business objectives. It may be a handy outcome of social software that users find themselves more connected to each other-- but these only matter if those connections can deliver quicker answers, better documentation, and acceptable solutions.

We should start by defining a standard model for Semantic Social Media Construction (SSMC) By "Construction" we are limiting our scope to the initial creation of a media message, to be shared with one's social network, and not any processes for responding to it.

There are three simple elements to the SSMC: the activity (what is being posted), the context (what it refers to), and the shareability (who to notify).

Activities

Truly, there's any number of questions that should prompt the user:

1. What are you thinking?
2. What are you feeling?
3. Where are you going?
4. What are you working on?
5. What question would you like to ask?
6. What event would you like to promote?
7. What original work would you like to share?
8. What are you reading / listening to / watching?
9. Are you witnessing something happening live?
10. Is this an emergency?
11. Are you just punning around?

A few weeks ago, I suggested that this activity could be further qualified by an urgency specific to it, and that this could be compactly coded (cf. the Star Priority Notation. *T0 would indicate; *Q9 would indicate a very urgent question.) Obviously, for this to gain wider usage, the codes could be filled in through a series of selection boxes.

We can extend the questions further.

Context

Twitter encourages users to code an event or theme with a tag preceded by a hash (a hashtag) . Del.icio.us users can specify any number of tags, and often suggests them for the user.

In theory, a social media client could pull a relevant ontology given a particular tag (for example, a conference could list sessions; a product could list features).

For an event, the poster can be prompted for date/location information.

Any post of "currently working on" could well tie into a project management system.

For reviewing other media works (articles, books, movies, etc) it seems natural to prompt the user to rate what they have posted (This had driven the hReview microformat).

Shareabiliy

Posting to Twitter effectively stuffs the inbox of all followers. The consequence is this limits the number of people one can follows. Why not give the poster the option to choose whether to broadcast it or not? Similarly, setting an urgency could be handled differently by each follower.

On the other hand, sometimes you want to bring special attention to a recipient. Facebook and LinkedIn both allow posters to explicitly name recipients. Twitter does not; one has to craft an additional message to contact people.

Questions have the most potential; the user may choose to submit them to networks such as LinkedIn. I've found that LinkedIn, for the average user (without thousands of followers) can broadcast questions to a much more diverse community.

In addition, how about supporting anonymous posts, as Craigslist does? Obviously, that goes against how Facebook and Twitter have been conceived. But the social media process is bigger than any single vendor has so far imagined it.

Quality

What do you mean when you say you've made a bookmark? Do you mean that it could be helpful to you at a later time? Or is it the sort of thing you want people to read now? Or is it because you are criticizing the content at the link? These are addressed by the Quality Tags, which includes 3 scales: positive, negative, and remedial reactions.

Implementation

Obviously, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Twitter will be laying claim to this area. But any vendor in the BPM or "Enterprise Social Media" space should also contribute to a standards effort ought to play a role as well. These are elemental social processes, so they should underlie any business processes.

The Star Priority Notation is a proposed nanoformat for users of Twitter or any microblggging service. A user can set a bang priority in their post/tweet such that it can be interpreted in a standard way by human readers or machine parsers. Readers who have a large number of tweets to catch up on (by virtue of following many people, or letting a long time lapse between checking updates) would now have a system to help them prioritize what they read.

[Note: the first version of this called it "Bang" Priority, using the bang symbol (! exclamation point). This didn't catch on, and also collided with the use of ! for marking groups in identi.ca. Star * also is easier to read.]

The Structure

Explaining the name:

Notation can be used interchangeably with the more technical "Nanoformat". It is "nano" as opposed to "micro", which has been used to describe XML-based notation (e.g., the Microformats wiki contains a page on Nanoformats). David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times referred to the more colloquial "notation" in his assessment of the service last week. ("Syntax" has generally been used to used to refer to system commands in Twitter).

Star is the asterisk symbol. It's nice and unobtrusive.

Priority is a rough approximation for the newsworthiness of an act of communication: rarity, utility, and timeliness of it. Twitter competitor Present.ly, for example, uses three bangs ("!!!") to indicate urgency. If 3 can be used, why not any number up to 9? (e.g., using !9 as a shortcut). I had read once that the old Telex wire service terminals would ring a number of times to represent the priority of the news; there were radio deejays who had never heard ten rings until Noveber 22, 1963. Somehow this was lost in the age of the "news crawl" and RSS -- all news from the most trivial to the most grave was placed on equal footing.

A single measure of priority would be difficult to establish universally. I figured that priority is likely relative to the activity taking place. I though this over a few days, and came up with four general areas, covering 7 broad activities of Twitter communications:

• self-contained expressions (Thoughts & Questions)
• references to hyperlinked resources (Publishing & Linking)
• references to current happenings (Now & Alerts)
  
• references to a person or people in physical location (Going & Events)

It is possible that more activities could be conceived ("S" for System Status, but *A could just as well be reused)."Commercial" is omitted from the list. It more applies to the source than to the activity.

The code is quite simple The first character is *; the second is the first letter of the activity above. The third character is a digit, 0-9. 0 may be reserved for activities which the author feels best to limit distribution; 9 is maximum urgency.

Though the numbers suggest the use of thresholds (e.g., "Only show me *G3 and above"), client software may be built to allow for any manner of customization, as long as the user interface can manage it. Alternately, you might want to direct your client software to throttle some number per day from chatty tweeters.

Activities & Priorities

CHANGES from March 1st. I've had this proposal up a little over a week, and have yet to get substantive feedback from peers (beyond "rather interesting" and "waaaaaaaay too complex"), so I've thought about a couple of the difficulties I've had.

First, I expanded the range to encompass all of 0-9. That way, you don't have to refer to this list to know what the max urgency is. It is 9 for every activity category, and it should be 9 for any new activity category. Again, of course, Twitter clients like TweetDeck could implement a user interface to do the encoding.

I also separated out Events from Going. It was easier to create separate scales here. Going is for personal travels.

Lastly, this is meant to be case insensitive-- though, take note of which case is more effective for certain letters. Q is more readable than q, which looks too much like g. L should always be used in place of lower-case l. I am open to people using H or h for hyperlink (emphasizing the "hyping" aspect of sharing links.)

Going (Geo)

Geographic location sharing was the inspiration for the Dodgeball service, which debuted in 2000; it was bought by Google and reconstituted as Latitude recently. This is ranked based on utility, how useful it is to the recipient:

• *G0 - Normal commute or errand
• *G1 - Arrived home (from local travel)
  
• *G2 - Arrived at expected place/event
• *G3 - Arrived at place/event was not planning to go to
  
• *G4 - Planning to go to event
  
• *G7 - Arrived home (from long-distance travel)
  
• *G8 - Arrived in new city (away from home)
• *G9 - I'll be late*
  

Events

These are public event announcements, non-specific to a particular person.

• *E1 - New product announcement
• *E3 - Media release (movie, record, book)
  
• *E5 - Meeting / meetup (gathering taking a few hours or shorter)
  
• *E7 - Conference (larger gathering taking half a day or longer)
  
• *E9 - Limited availability tickets announcement (concert, etc.)
  

Thought (Tweet)

Many Tweets are simple thoughts, observations, and fragments of conversations. They can be ranked according to utility:

• *T0 - Talking to oneself (or, if a response, directly to the recipient)
  
• *T1 - Of interest to peers
  
• *T2 - Of interest to anyone
• *T4 - Of timely/contextual interest
• *T6 - Of artistic, poetic, or comedic value
• *T8 - Personal announcement (change in address/job/health, birth/engagement/etc.)

Question (or Favor requests or Ideas)

Twitter has been extremely helpful in in soliciting feedback. Of course, it depends on how many followers you have, and how many are listening at the present time. Identifying questions will help draw attention to them. Favor requests and ideas are similar in that they expect feedback ("Can you help me", "What do you think?"). These should be ranked according to timeliness:

• *Q1 - General question or idea, with no deadline
  
• *Q2 - Need an answer with some arbitrary deadline
  
• *Q5 - Need an answer today
  
• *Q7 - Need an answer now

(I have used a similar categorization for my company's internal forums; I could think of no other way of articulating an urgency.)

Publishing (an original story)

It is common for bloggers and news outlets to release their stories via Twitter. Using microblogging is much more flexible than RSS, since you can hand-craft your own feeds, and point to older resources. The rating objective here is to reward rarity. Generally, the more time that the author worked on preparing it, the more rare it is.

• *P0 - Rumor / unsourced fact
• *P1 - Opinion (everybody has one...)
  
• *P2 - Humor
• *P3 - Random thoughts / collection of hyperlinks
  
• *P4 - Press release / Announcement
• *P5 - Advice / howto / "service journalism"
• *P6 - News article / Interview
  
• *P7 - Analysis / Feature / Proposal
  
• *P8 - Research report / documentary
  
• *P9 - Interactive graphics, web databases, mashups
  

I've conspicuously left out blog posts here. There is no singular concept of "blog post"; they are any of the above.

Rumor, humor, and opinion are the most commonly produced, and more likely to be forwarded as well. Reducing their priority number can help counteract that tendency.

I have suggested that the pinncacle of the art is something with no name, nor a familiar community of practioners. Some people I can think of who may be known for this are Adrien Holovaty, mashup pioneer; Nate Silver, election statgeek; and Alberto Cairo, infographics researcher.

Reposting (your own story)

This is for posting a link to an already posted/published link. Use P, and the above scale.

Linking (somebody else's story)

Certainly, the history of blogging has been about linking to other people's content. Hyperlinks now consist of 20% of Tweets.

This can re-use the scale for publishing above, starting with L or H (for Hyperlink).

Now/News

Live communications is a popular subset of media. These are ranked by rarity:

• *N0 - What you're doing now
  
• *N2 - First-person account of a "staged" event (conference, speech)
  
• *N4 - First person account of a dynamic event (sporting event, press conference)
• *N6 - First person live exclusive
• *N8 - Breaking News

Alert

This is similar to live reporting, though it focuses on utility -- how important it is for you to know.

• *A1 - All clear
  
• *A2 - General inconvenience (traffic, noise)
  
• *A4 - General public endangement (natural catastrophe)
  
• *A6 - Personal character endangerment (harassment or defamation)
  
• *A8 - Personal physical dangermenet
  

Obviously, this is not to suggest a replacement for official emergency services (911 in the U.S.) It does, however, suggest that a pure text protocol can be used if necessary. The event of character endagerment is much more common on the Internet, which led me to devise the Protocol for Online Abuse Reporting in 2007. It seems to me this should be covered by a texting alert protocol as well.

Examples

I picked a tweet from the last 5 hours from 20 people I follow. I'm not promising an exact science here, but I feel this captures a diversity of the types of things people post to Twitter. Tagging consistently-- and building tools to render the tagged data appropriately -- can help us effectively filter the priority items.

1. Dries Blog post: Mollom software partner program http://tinyurl.com/dlo5dw *P4
   
2. jeffmcneill Lo tek fixes to Hi tek problems (NYtimes) http://www.nytimes.com/2009... *L5
   
3. BostonUpdate Sports: All Pedroia, all the time? - http://is.gd/kcJV *P4
   
4. hootsuite And we're back* What a swift owl* Our servers are humming along again. Things should be running smoothly now. *A1
   
5. Roxyyo Apparently the Obamas can save the economy simply by broadcasting everything they buy. It will all sell out like Canadian maple cookies. *T1
   
6. mbauwens Added to the wiki: Knol: Discussion ?Older revision Revision as of 05:49, 20 Febr.. http://tinyurl.com/c4gtfx *P5
   
7. TweetStats The *Real* Top 20 Twitter Applications. http://tinyurl.com/av85ly Based off >50million tweets. *P8
   
8. ariherzog It should be noted, for whatever it's worth, that my pledge to not blog about twitter this month is continuing as promised. *T1
   
9. amazonk Deadgirl versus Shawn of the Dead. How to keep your high school desires satisfied with zombies. *T1
   
10. Digidave New Blog Post Fun Friday Links http://tinyurl.com/bhu8xa<span class="bittip" classname="bittip"><span><span><iframe rel="" name="bigurlframe" class="bigurlframe" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"> *P3
    
11. AriMelber TWITTER REC: ProPublic launches @changetracker to help follow stimulus spending and online transparency. *L9
    
12. jdp23 good night all* sorry #p2 had a rough night tonight ... growing pains. i'll summarize the first week in a blog post tomorrowish *T1
    
13. Pistachio "Follow as many as you can, click like crazy until Twitter put the handcuffs on you, then... un-follow anyone who isn’t following you." *T4
    
14. eszter excellent dinner conversation with Howard Gardner, Brigid Barron and Alex Quinn at MacArthur Grantees' meeting *T1
    
15. jowyang RT @frostola Social Media is an opportunity, but we're being careful to measure worth and impact. Otherwise you risk being branded trivial. *T3
    
16. BrianReich I am an idiot. I went from too tired to write to two hours of TV. It's midnight. I am still up. I have a lot to do tomorrow. Idiot. *T0
    
17. BenBaril Google Desktop vs Copernic vs Windows Live Search? *Q1
    
18. skemsley Debunking Tapscott: You're never too old to get the Net: http://idek.net/39l *L5
    
19. robertniles Disaster averted in CA today. But until we kill Prop 13 rules, gov't meltdown in CA will be inevitable. Time for majority rule. *T3
    
20. billtrippe Podictionary, a podcast for word lovers, http://blog.oup.com/2009/02... *L6
    

I didn't join Go Daddy as a customer after your first Super Bowl commercial, or even after the second. A lot of other people did, and when I noticed you were the market leader, I figured I couldn't go wrong. I also thought it was cool that your image was anti-Silicon Valley: an ex-Marine in Scottsdale, a flag-waving NASCAR sponsor.

I haven't had major problems with your service, none like Gordon Lyon did with SecLists. I host a website for the podcasts from my dad's radio show, The Advocates on WVOX. A few months back I woke up to find that it completely disappeared. I called customer service and we discovered that a credit card expiration on optional bandwidth had had triggered this; your technician was able to restore it over the phone. Another of my sites, Campaign Trails, an archive of lost digital political campaign effects, has had no problems - after all, I don't actively add to it.

Still, the whole user experience gnaws at me. When I'm managing my domains, I don't feel as I'm control, I feel like I'm dodging ads. And I don't feel like there's a cohesive architecture to the services. I can give out a separate login to a Quick Blogcast, but not a conventional website hosted by your SecureServer. Quick Blogcast sometimes wipes out the entry when I add a podcast. These sorts of questions are not billing related, and they're the types of questions which would have answers in an online community. Any other Internet technology with millions of customers/users has a vibrant online community. I can't find yours. I found Nodaddy instead.

So I have some requests:

1. You launched a Go Daddy Connections community back in November 2007. It's been barely used in 14 months. Of the dozen forums, three deal with your products, they have 62 discussions with 300 posts. Integrate it within your website. I couldn't even find a placae to add a new post. I entered a support ticket. Customer service emailed back, and thought I was asking about Quick Blogcast. I called tech support. The technician on the phone had no idea what it was, and put me on hold for 15 minutes. I eventually figured out that if I clicked "Reply" I'd get a form which would enable my account to let me post. But who will read it? The Nodaddy community is more active than yours.
2. You've been a pioneer CEO blogger. Back in 2006, you had written about industry issues like domain kiting and the .EU TLD fiasco. You gave that up in 2007, with a near full-time obsession about the Super Bowl ads. Last year you abandoned text for video, which spared anyone the pleasure of skimming through your written content. Bob: we're busy watching football (or NASCAR); are we supposed to have time to be watching you? When we're on the GoDaddy website, we're looking to solve problems. You're the CEO of one of the most powerful privately held Internet companies. What's on your mind that we should care about?
3. You've been open to the idea of just skipping the Super Bowl ad. But that was last year. This year your marketing is again in overdrive on the T&A. How many more boobs are left to sign up for your service because they're drooling at the TV? Ad campaigns can't last forever. Suprise us. Let me give you some names: Blades. Omidyar. Cuban. Schmidt. Gates. Call 'em a bunch of liberals, engaged in pinko philanthropic projects like voter mobilization, microlending, socially conscious films, saving Africa. So what's your legacy gonna be?
4. A lot of social responsibility falls upon a registar and hosting provider: issues about fair trade practices, privacy rights, injurious speech. I sense that you're a free speech balancer -- one is genuinely concerned about unchecked absolute speech. It's a not enviable position on the Internet, as any motion to censor will leave people unhappy. Here's something for you: back in 2007, I came across the stories of women whose were the subject of harassment, defamatory speech, and wrongful public exposure. I came up with the Protocol for Online Network Abuse Reporting as a way to help straighten out the due process issues. I tried to engage some ICANN's GNSO Whois task force working on OPoC, but to no avail. I never got anywhere with Harvard's Berkman center either. Maybe it will interest you -- when you get through the above three.

I figure there's only one way to get your attention: Bare chests, strategically covered. Here's the first one. If it comes to asking busty women to get our message out to you, well, we'll see what we can do. Pictures are tagged "godaddy" on Flickr.

I'm not *presently* affiliated with nodaddy.com, though I will probably register for the forum. I just figure they'll like the publicity, and they'll have concrete ideas of their own to give you.

Update: I had asked people about their Go Daddy experience on LinkedIn earlier this evening, and I saw that 4 out of 5 web professionals have no complaints. Suppose that 99% of customers are generally happy with the service. That would leaves 60,000 unhappy customers, and a mere 1% of that would be a tough caucus to tangle with on any customer community. (I just registered as user #651 on the Nodaddy forums to post an invitation to the above.) There may well be some threshold of critics to which a social media expert may plainly say that they will be too costly to manage. I would counter with the advice from Sun-Tzu and the Godfather: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Update, January 28th: Nobody ever reads about the viral campaigns that flop. So keep reading. I changed the picture. One, I needed a new message. The previous one wasn't clear at all. I added "Hey GoDaddy.com" to make it absolutely clear whom I was talking to. Second I realized I wanted to title this Service over Supermodels. I'm not against models; I just want service to be paramount. In fact, I have a new appreciation for modeling: in the first picture I had a Steve Carrell-look going, "Why am I in the bathroom holding this piece of paper?" I figured that affecting DeNiro would command a little more respect. The angled paper adds to the dynamism. Also, per viewer request, any chest hair is now strategically hidden.

I'll add that GoDaddy did respond to my other outstanding ticket request. They wanted me to clarify the question. I still feel it's  easier just to take a screencap of the MCE editor and post it to an open support forum. Alas, I didn't hear back from the Nodaddy.com forum.

Update, February 1st, 11:25pm: Amazing game, obviously. Five years ago I had know idea where "the blogs" were in order to find out whether my Super Bowl party all witness Janet Jackson. Now I'm following Twitter-- and being an active participant as well. A number of folks are threatening to leave, and a NetworkSolutions Twitterer is encouraging. Still, it's clear to me that Twitter is highly insular. No one outside Twitter will care; and no one will understand if a newspaper account tomorrow talks about the carping on Twitter. People will take notice if they see photos. No one else has yet to tag one.

Update, Feburary 3rd, 10:03pm: This post was originally going to go to a site on Ning, called YoDaddy. I ended up putting on Civilities, and not until I saw all the Twitter posts after the Super Bowl did I start updating YoDaddy. 8 people have joined. No other pictures have been submitted to Flickr, though.