How do you use Twitter (if you do)? It strikes me that a new approach to attention is required that perhaps we are not automatically hard-wired to adapt to.

In the analogue world we would have an in-tray which would fill up with mail and which we would empty. An empty in-tray implied we were on top of things. It was a good thing.

Fast-forward to the electronic world and now we have email. Same thing applies – though now it is harder. The empty (or at least read) inbox is a "good thing" and you are on top of things if you achieve this.

Now we have Twitter. Popular clients like Thwirl have a "mark as read" feature which implies we should be viewing Twitter in the same way. But when you get up to 100, or 200 or even 300 people you are following it isn’t really realistic that you can read everything – assuming you have something else to do in your life.

So perhaps the analogy is more of a river – you dip in when you can, maybe surfing back a couple of hours to see what’s going on now, but you don’t stress if you are not "up to date". RSS has been like this for some time – if you follow a reasonable number of media sources you will regularly have over 1,000 unread items.

It seems to me that there is a real power in Twitter’s kind of background, lightweight information model, but I’m not sure we are necessarily particularly evolutionarily suited to it. Maybe we will have to learn some new skills, as I’m completely sure the future will be more, not less, like this.

Just read the transcript of Stephen Johnson’s talk on the future of news media which he gave at SXSW in Austin, Texas a couple of days ago. In the talk he gives an optimistic assessment of the prospects of news reporting in the future with two possible exceptions: war reporting and international coverage.

Johnson uses the past as a guide to future developments and points out how difficult it was to get information about Apple in 1989 compared to today when there are literally hundreds of sources of up to date information to choose from – ranging from conventional magazines to blogs of all sizes and specialisations. This is true of the whole technology information space.

And what started in the technology information space, and spread quickly to politics, he says will spread to all sectors in time. And in local reporting, where there is currently a lot of angst in both the US and the UK, the situation will also be better in the future, he argues, than in the past. He is co-founder of a hyper-local site called outside.in which aims to aggregate neighbourhood-level information, an example of the kind of development he predicts will become commonplace.

The reason for the current depression, he argues, there should have been a decade-long transition from paper to online business models.

Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two.

Technorati Tags: media, newspapers, financial crisis, SXSW

Interesting interview of Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn chairman and ceo, with Charlie Rose.

Technorati Tags: interview, social media, video

A new challenge is confronting conference speakers today: Twitter. In increasing numbers audience are using Twitter to create a back channel around a conference. This can be a challenge to the presenter, but social media consultant Laura Fitton, aka Pistachio Consulting, argues the opposite.

She lists a number of benefits including:

• Helping the audience focus
• The audience gets more content
• Audience members get questions answered on the fly
• The audience members can connect with each other

And if all else fails, she says, and the talk is really dull at least there’s something else to do!

Technorati Tags: presentation, twitter

A couple of stories which have been blowing up on the Twittersphere over the past couple of days serve to illustrate the point that organisations’ reputations are very vulnerable to their employees’ (or affiliates’) actions online – and in particular on social media.

The first was the furore surrounding the “effing blogs” post by Adam Tinworth – read all about it here. The second was today when Kevin May wrote about another social media inspired fracas, this time involving Ryan Air.

I wonder if we aren’t reaching some kind of tipping point?

Technorati Tags: blogs, social media

Twitter has been in the news a lot recently and not all of it for the right reasons. The (positive) obsession started with living legend Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross which ignited some frenzied MSM attention.

Then followed what @henryp calls the “twatlash” – adverse media attention such as the Mail’s “social media gives you cancer” stunner, or the Sunday Times’ expose showing that use of Twitter stems from a lack of identity.

Of course Twitter is a communication medium rather than a phenomenon in its own right, and has been used for many, many things: back channel, friend network broadcast tool, research, earthquake early warning, and much, much more.

But we will know when it finally has come of age when Twitter the subject does not take up any air-time on Twitter the medium. After all how many emails discuss the phenomenon of email?

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter

A great post by Daniel Victor sets out to explain his new role as MoJo – mobile journalist. He seems genuinely excited about this new challenge:

What that means is, correctly, still to be determined. We do know it’ll involve video, still photography, print stories and a lot of updates for the Web. We know I’ll have a laptop and an aircard, will file most of my stories from my car and coffee shops, and will aim to be in the office as little as possible.

He says his stated goal will be have one originally generated story a day, be it in words, video, audio or some combination.

Every day I’ll solicit story ideas from my readers via comments on the blog. At the end of the day, I’ll post their story ideas in poll form, and my readers will vote on which one they want me to cover tomorrow. And that’s the one I’ll do.

The new tools available to journalists – from laptops, Blackberries and Flip video, to Moveable Type, Twitter and Flickr – make possible a dramatic re-invention of the profession. It is only a pity that there are so few actively engaged in pushing the boundaries so far.

Technorati Tags: innovation, journalism, media, productivity

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Jonathan Jarvis, as part of his thesis at the the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, produced this excellent animation to explain exactly what caused the credit crisis. Excellent stuff.

Technorati Tags: credit crunch, visualisation

I’ve just read an interesting post by Koka Sexton which details five ways to grow a local blog. There has been a lot of agonised debate about the role (and economic future) of local newspapers so it was interesting to see one person using modern social technology to such good effect. It’s worth a read, but the headlines are:

1. Use Twitter to spread the word
2. Use Craigslist to generate traffic
3. Let your readers know you care
4. Remember local content is king
5. Use local advertising

It would be interesting to see a version of this for b2b niches – many of the approaches would transfer well.