new media Archive

A letter to the editor received from a young reader:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my friends say there is no Twitter Pro.
Papa says, if you see it on THE INTERNETS it's so.
Please tell me the truth; is there a Twitter Pro?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what Apple and Microsoft tell them.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Twitter Pro. It exists as certainly as user entry form mockups and vaporware and unfunded startups exist, and you know that they abound as dead and moribund webpages on servers this whole world round.

Not believe in Twitter Pro? You might as well not believe in boo.com, or etoys.com or Webvan.

You might get your papa to hire men to watch Source Forge night and day, but even if they didn’t see beta versions coming down the pipe, what would that prove?  Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

No Twitter Pro? Unfathomable. Because VIRGINIA if we tell ourselves that Twitter Pro is nothing but a fairy tale, if we come to believe its just a hoax on the unsuspecting, then we must again ask ourselves that much scarier and vexing question: “How can Twitter monetize itself.”

The Editor

[Snark Rosetta Stone: "Twitter Pro" was an April Fools Joke promulgated by the folks who brought you the Shorty Awards. It was an alleged invitation to participate in the beta program for a rumored paid enhanced service on Twitter that would monetize it. But it really was nothing more than a website that took your twitter avatar and put a "PRO" banner on it, and sent you to your twitter page to replace your avatar with the "enhanced" one. It then let you tweet an invitation to others. A lot of people were fooled, and I was one of them.]

The text message, the rise of IM and Twitter have helped spawn a new argot of phrases shortened to acronyms or words transliterated to letter-number combinations (H8 for hate, 4 instance) or pictographs (<3 for love). In some ways it’s become a cant, but one influenced primarily by the nature of the delivery medium not by the clique developing and adopting it.

But its far from the first time this has happened. The telegraph was an innovation that, for its time, was as revolutionary as the Internet, and it gave rise to a clique that spoke a new language that was as modern as the discovery of electrical current that enabled the telegraph to work.

A whole new set of acronyms were developed, many of them shorthands that described the telegraphy process itself. There were jokes that arose from the way words appeared when they were converted to dots and dashes. There was power in being the first one who knew how the world changed day to day, and in being trusted to know everybody’s business, because you could send a secret telegram, but you had to tell the telegrapher.

Those who spoke this new electric language through their telegraph keys had a bond that elevated them in late 19th and early 20th century society, and many of them became the movers and shakers who would shape the rest of the 20th century, and at the rise of telegraphy nobody saw this coming.

We are in a period of great communications change.  On January 7, 2006, Western Union delivered its last telegram. What was once the paradigm of the important message became meaningless in a world awash in instantaneous worldwide data connectivity. In December of that year, the FCC dropped its requirement that amateur radio operators must pass a Morse Code proficiency exam.

Though we’re losing our legacy communications systems: newspapers dying, radio broadcasting its death rattle, there is tremendous comfort that even as we develop new systems we’re for the most part not making things up as we go along. We’ve been here B4.

CUL 73 CL

The folks at ceasespin.org are angry, and they have good reason to be. The media lie and even when you catch them at it, the government seems powerless to stop them.  They’ve got a plan to change things, but like so many plans that arise from anger, they haven’t thought things through. Much of their outrage is tied to the reversal on appeal of a wrongful termination verdict in 2003 stemming from a case in which reporters for WTVT, Tampa, refused to air the statements of Monsanto employees that they personally knew to be false.

This is a sad commentary on the nature of the media, but its also a case where hard cases make good law, and the ceasespin.org site should be a great resource for journalism schools everywhere, because in just a few web pages, the site illustrates the conundrum of how objectivity can be achieved and who decides what is fair.  For instance, they’ve not yet been able to come up with a standard:

Note: this prototype is for informational and educational purposes only. It demonstrates what quality criteria might be used in an actual news quality rating system and how that translates into a quality rating score. The actual news quality standard is still in development and will be published on this and other websites further into the development cycle.

This is not surprise to any third or fourth year journalism undergraduate who has considered the difficulty of who decides. There is a clear danger in any system that places the government in control of media content, and while there are today few first amendment questions for licensed broadcast media (NBC v. United States 1943 pretty much decided that), government regulations must be reasonable and necessary.

So, after a lot of hue and cry, ceasespin winds up posting a self-policing system that is essentially what should be taking place in any good newsroom and has been taught in j-schools at least since the 1930s. Other suggestions like the fairness doctrine and media deconsolidation are much better solutions, but they’re hardly the province of ceasespin. In fact, the fairness doctrine probably is not necessary if there’s diversity of ownership, which was the original concept behind getting rid of it.

In fact, if ceasespin were to apply the standard it wants to see in others to its own coverage of the Fox news decision, it would have to check “no” to at least 6 of its criteria, and probably more. There are reasons that the FCC policies are not laws, but those aren’t cited in the ceasespin story, because it would undercut its own movement. So its own score on its own test: FAIL.

Many, many years ago back when the FCC mandated news and public service commitments for radio stations, one of my duties as a local radio newsman was reviewing movies, TV shows and local live music venues. I came to have great respect for the Eberts and the Maltins (even when I didn’t agree with their opinions); knowing too much as a critic can cause you to lose objectivity.

Unless you’re writing for an industry mag, you’re speaking to an audience who may see a movie a month, while you’re seeing a movie a day, and it wasn’t long before I was an insufferable boring movie elitist for whom the grittiest little twisted indie was gold and everything coming out of the major studios was shit.

Javier's Jesus

How I got there was seeing the ground-breaking material that was the one good scene in some cheap indie being ripped off two years later by a major motion picture. It never failed to piss me off, and it just happened to me again–this time in new media–when I viewed the highly lauded first runner up (The Power of the Crunch) in the Doritos Crash The Super Bowl filmmaking contest.

I sure hope the producers of Power of the Crunch had Javier Prato on their team (I can’t find any credits listing him). He’s a talented DP and obviously a pretty creative guy, considering his Jesus Christ: The Musical went viral three years ago. You’d think it deserves at least a hat tip from the Power of the Crunch producers, considering they shamelessly ripped off his payoff right down to the framing.

Back when game shows were as simple as three people, a spartan set and a couple of cameras, You Bet Your Life featured the witty Groucho Marx, announcer George Feneman, and a mustached prop duck that was flown on a pully up above the lights. At the start of the show a “secret word” was announced sotto voce by Feneman, but kept secret from the contestant.

If the contestant said the secret word, which was usually a common but random word that had little to do with the game or the contestant’s life, they got an extra $100.

A stagehand lowered the duck into view of the camera and contestant. The duck had a hundred dollar bill in its beak. (Big money gameshows–and in those days big money was $64,000–didn’t come along for a few years).

Today, I got followed on Twitter by @diabetesnews, whom I didn’t follow back. I don’t have any war with @diabetesnews (or diabetes either, at least yet) and if I were diabetic or involved as a caregiver to someone who was, I might have sought them out. Its good information, in a reasonable amount, well linked.

But what troubles me about this is that I probably got selected because of an offhand snarky comment I made back to @WillPao over his “What age does it become inappropriate to eat Lucky Charms.” It was my answer, I suspect, that got me the follow: “The day you’re diagnosed with Type II diabetes. ”

Maybe I’m just being tech paranoid, and since I made my tweets public, I can hardly be outraged that people follow me. There could me other reasons, and I DM’d @DiabetesNews to inquire. But what worries me is the possibility that it was a bot that made this choice on the basis of a random, offhand remark. I said the secret word, and the duck came down.

I’ve come to love Twitter, which has supplanted other services and software. Its become my tip service, which I tune by deciding whom I follow and hoping that the right people follow me back so that I can return the favor in interest areas I watch closely.

Therefore losing followers and dumping people I follow is probably a good thing. Others are deciding that my content isn’t tuned to their life, or somebody else out there is doing a better job, and gaining followers isn’t necessarily a good thing, because if they picked me because of what I say and what I think, there’s a high probably I’ll like them just as much and will follow back. The incoming stream is already bigger than I’d like.

As Twitter matures, there will be more and more refinement in the art of finding the right mix. Atherton Bartelby’s Mashable post on Follow Fail is an excellent example. We’ve already had the first great security breech, and those of us who didn’t think security was an overriding concern (I mean, its just little txt messages) have been taken to the virtual woodshed.

What we don’t need, is an environment where every tweet is processed by sea of algorithms run by a world-wide collection of special interest groups,  and each day your last few days of tweets are reflected in a wagon-load of tangential follows.

Twitter is at a critical juncture, between security issues, the right mix of commercialization vs. pure social interaction, and just plain too much success. I wish them nothing but luck. They’ve got some serious problems on the horizon, but they’ve also got a lot of users out here who think they’re cooler than a mustached duck with a hundred dollar bill in its beak.

Its a voice that startles you at first. Its not good, I thought. The songs were strange, sardonic, almost silly, and simultaneously deeply meaningful. And the voice. Was Jim Bianco serious? But we found ourselves listening again.

A modern Madeira (m'dear)

When the Portuguese started shipping their wine to the world in casks on sailing ships they didn’t know it was being stepped on by the heat of the passage in warm holds through tropical waters. Until one day one of the ships returned with its cargo of Madeira unsold.

When the Portuguese tasted their superheated wine, they were shocked; it hadn’t been helped by the long travel in the heat. Or had it? It had a taste that was shocking at first, but strangely captivating.

So we listened to Jim Bianco again, and again. We started dissecting it like the Portuguese picking through the tastes and flavors of their mutated wine. Though we had only three Bianco cuts, and two of them were alternate versions of the same song, we had taste after taste.

Is it meter that makes I have a thing for you so interesting, or is it phrasing or is it some combiantion of both? And it wasn’t long before we, like the Portugese sampling their tortured wine, were drunk on Jim Bianco, and couldn’t remember what we found objectionable about it at our first taste,

They’re scared. The newspaper crossownership restrictions that the FCC loosened in late 2007 may be an early target of the Obama administration’s desire to help return some diversity to legacy media, and the arguments are already beginning.

Broadcasting and Cable posted their “Open Hopes” yesterday in a pleading editorial that would have made George Orwell proud:

“Diversity can mean helping preserve TV and radio stations by allowing those in smaller markets to combine resources and ensuring that the government does not try to silence its critics.”

That’s got to go down with “less is more” and “obedience is freedom,” as a truly great oxymoron, so let me make this real simple for the obviously confused guardians of our public airwaves. Diversity is more people owning fewer media outlets. That means the local newspaper does not get to buy the local television station.

In the 1930s this was newspapers' biggest fear

In some cases, that is going to result in newspapers going out of business, sometimes the very same newspapers that tried to run radio stations out of business in the 1930s, until United Press threw in the towel and started putting wire services in radio stations.

The Broadcasting and Cable “Open Hopes” editorial tries to finesse its point by talking about “stations in midsized markets” and then changing the subject as quickly as possible to Bush’s embedded reporters and wholesale classification of embarrassing government reports. That’s not the point, in fact its counter-intuitive. If we had more diversity, somebody might actually have called Bush out on those issues at the time!

Broadcasters: you have two choices. Either start providing a range of opinions on your properties so that you can point to diversity on your own outlets, or get ready to be forced to divest them or to face that dreaded “fairness doctrine.” If you had been doing your jobs, there’d be no reason for any of this.

And stop trying to play this off as being somehow driven by troubles at midsized stations in small markets. It was the Chicago Tribune sale that caused FCC Chief Kevin Martin to ram this through, followed by Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones.

And if you’re looking for “synergy” (meaning you get to buy the local television station), think again. The public airwaves are not there to pay for your red ink. If you need a new delivery medium, look to the Internet.

I got my report from Mr. Tweet today. If tweeting, Twitter and and the whole concept of social networking with an extensible API is foreign: the short version is its a way to drop 140-character messages into a virtual world where people who “follow” you see them almost immediately and others can search and find.

I knew about Twitter just from the background noise of the net, but when Tim Elliott of Winecast sent me an invitation, I accepted, even though I couldn’t see any benefit to it. Twitter just seemed silly. But I also knew Elliott was a smart and talented early adopter. If he liked it, I was probably missing something.

Over the last few weeks, Twitter has demonstrated itself as the next step in this evolution of connectivity, and I am now seeing the new apps that fill in the blanks, like Twitter Grader and Mr. Tweet: virtual appliances that ferret out folks on your wavelength and make it easy to include them in your own staccato-statement world.

And another truth was starting to reveal itself. The more these appliances make suggestions on people to follow, the more often I know who they are, and the more they’re “the usual suspects”–people I know (in a ! IRL way) from my last waystations along the early adopter highway.

Like the #1 suggestion on my first Mr. Tweet report: Robert Scoble. I am already following Dave Winer. Can the prompt to add Adam Curry be far off?

Next will come the wholesale monetization of Twitter, which was deftly avoided by them waving off Facebook’s offer of cash and pseudo-cash, but sooner or later, they’ll take the bait and tweets will suddenly sport more product placement than America’s Biggest Loser.

And that will be my cue to move on down the road, where I’m sure to find all the usual suspects on my next stop along this information superhighway that gets smarter at every turn.

I was ready to pitch Disney on a sequel. “Honey, I shrunk the phone book.” If I had any doubt that the old media was dying a slow agonizing death, it was put to rest when I picked up a plastic bag in my driveway today. I thought whatever was in that little bag couldn’t possibly be good, and AT&T probably is thinking the same thing.

Any smaller, and it disappears!

Eons ago, the Yellow Pages was the place to find every restaurant, every auto body shop, and every ambulance chasing attorney with 80 square inches of colored ink touting their praises. In Vegas “escort services” was a whole chapter. Selling ads was almost easy; identify a potential client’s competitors, drop a few hints about how big the competitor’s ad would be, and produce the contract.

Newspapers are scurrying for cover and firing their oldest employees first to get the greatest cost savings. Magazines are shuttering daily,  radio is past tense, outdoor feels the pinch of increased air travel and, at least until recently, gas prices that make road trips impossible.

And letting our fingers do the walking? Could that be yet another reason we’re a nation of the obese?