I have an early morning tomorrow so I wanted to put this up now. 

I'll be staying with some friends and their home is a Dial-Up Zone (ugh) so this blog will be dark until December 2nd.  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the U.S. and a pleasant Thursday to all those abroad. 

I’ve talked about how I think it’s ridiculous to call Twitter a news source before.  I wasn’t planning to revisit it.  But this quote from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch kind of set me off. 

Twitter isn’t the place for solid facts yet - the situation is way too disorganized. But it’s where the news is breaking. GroundReport is doing a good job of aggregating citizen reports, and a Wikipedia page is being edited with the known facts so far.

How can you say something like that?  The facts ARE THE NEWS.  Nothing else is relevant.  In fact, the noise that twitter generates in situations like these is downright cruel and dangerous.

Let me give you the perfect example of what I mean.

If you watch Twitter you’ll see people reporting an attack at the Marriot Hotel in Mumbai.  The problem is there was NO ATTACK on the Marriot.  The Ramada hotel next door was attacked by several gun men but nothing’s happened at the Marriot.

Now imagine, if you’re someone who has family or friends at the Marriot right now.  You’d be scared out of your mind over information that’s completely false. 

I’m sorry but it really makes me angry.  What you have here are people who simply don’t care if they get the news right.  They’re turning the most dire of situations into entertainment by using Twitter to “be involved in the story.”  They throw their little tweets out not caring who they scare half to death and then brag about how great Twitter is for “beating the mainstream media at reporting the news.”

Honestly, I’m tempted to say it should be a crime what some of these people are doing (and in fact was for a time)

Update: Techdirt led me to this article (and linked here, thanks for that).  I addressed this in a later post but I did want to make the point quickly here.  The flaw in saying "the mainstream media gets it wrong to" is that you are equating a 1-to-1 correlation.  But that's not the case.  The media does have safeguards to reporting false information, even if those safeguards sometimes fail.  Twitter has none.  This leads to Twitter reporting false info more frequently and to that false information being far worse than what the media would report.  For example, I doubt the mainstream media has ever reported a 1.8 magnitude earthquake as an explosion.

One of the things that I’m tremendously grateful for are the e-mail relationships I’ve developed because of this blog.  When I used to view blogs I always thought most people commented on things and that bloggers got very few e-mails. 

I can’t speak for anyone else but in my case it’s been exactly the opposite and it’s been a real joy in my life (along with the few people I have who regularly comment).  Anyway, here’s an excerpt from one such person (who prefers to remain anonymous) about a post I made a couple days ago…

[begin excerpt]

Hey Tom,

Don’t you think your being a little negative in your [post regarding political change].  I get what you’re saying but I just think it would be more productive to actually suggest changes rather than point out nonsense changes

[end excerpt]

Now this is a topic that I could write pages and pages on but just to make the point here are a few changes I’d like to see, that are fully within President-Elect Obama’s power to do, and that I think would constitute real change.  These were picked because of their cost.  All of these could be implemented for less than 1% of 1% of 1% of the total Federal Budget.    

1.  Hire two people, a Republican and a Democrat and have them work together to write non-biased, paragraph long explanations of each law currently being considered in the congress.  These explanations would be posted on-line and would actually tell people what each law does and what the implications of that law will be.  Most laws are written in a way that obscures a paragraph long idea into a 200 page proposed law.  The reason for that is people in congress have staff members who can summarize each law for them while the public doesn’t.  So the public gives up on trying to track new laws because they don’t have the tolerance to read through 200 pages.

2.   Provide a service that allows people to easily write their representatives and which has a voting mechanism so those in congress can easily see a tally of how their constituency truly feels on issues. 

3.  Host short public debates between Republicans and Democrats on issues facing the nation so the public can hear what each side truly believes and not just the sound bites they hear during elections.

4.  Create and Publicize an open source project for a voting machine that can’t be tampered with so the problems of voting irregularities can actually become a thing of the past.

Again I feel the need to point out the above items would cost virtually nothing in the scheme of things.  To give just one example it would cost 1/6th of what we spent studying the shelf life of Tomatoes in 2007. 

That said (here comes the cynic) I don’t think we’ll see any of the above changes anytime soon.  The problem right now, as I outlined in the post referenced above, is that both parties don’t actually trust the American people at this point.  To most politicians the public has become a group of people you trick into electing you and then ignore until you need to pander to them again. 

Bottom line: Actual change isn’t that hard you just have to want to do it. 

Mark Evans asks an interesting question in his post “Who’s the Right Buyer for Twitter?”

A different - and perhaps better - question is who’s right buyer. For whatever reason, Facebook doesn’t seem like right choice to carry the Twitter to the next level. My fear is once Twitter is within the Facebook fold, whatever je-ne-sais-quoi it had will disappear to the point where Twitter will stop being Twitter.

But the reality is Twitter’s in play. It’s entertaining offers, and waiting for the right deal to come along.

The problem with Twitter is that there’s just no way for them to make enough money to support themselves.  Their only viable revenue stream at this point is advertising and I don’t see any type of Ads fitting Twitter’s needs.

Let’s run down the list…

Banner Ads: It wouldn’t be hard to do but in order to make it work you’d have to (a) blanket the site with them and (b) kill off all the feeds and third party apps (because a lot of users never visit the actual site anymore).  Because of those two factors I don’t see this being a viable option.

Pop-Up Ads: Suffers from all the above mentioned issues and would alienate users in the blink of an eye. 

Which brings us to the only viable option.

In-Line Ads: These types of Ads (text ads embedded into twitter feeds like regular tweets) are probably the only realistic ad that Twitter can get away with.  But you have to remember Twitter needs some pretty massive hardware to keep going and text ads deliver the lowest yield of any type of Ad.  So the question then becomes…

How could Twitter make enough off of inline text ads to pay for their massive bandwidth and processor needs? 

The Answer: They can’t.  There’s just no way.  Accepting that fact brings us back to the original question because now the question turns to…

What other assets of value does Twitter have that could compensate for the fact that it’s destined to lose money?

The Answer to that is simple: Information.  Twitter has tons of information at it’s fingertips if someone can find a way to harness it right.  So the final questions is…

What company do we know of that’s an expert in text based Ads and which has a business that focuses almost entirely on collecting and using information? 

The Answer: Google.  They’re the only company with the resources to keep Twitter going and the ability to harness the information Twitter can provide.  No other company even comes close (save maybe Microsoft if they got their act together). 

So to my eyes, Google is Twitter’s only hope of actually surviving.  Unfortunately, Google also seems to be “the place where startups go to die.”  But Twitter’s cheated death before with far fewer resources so I have to ask…couldn’t they manage it one more time?

Fred Wilson posts on Techmeme being dominated by professionally produced blogs…

I think what's happening is techmeme is catering more and more to the professionally produced tech blogs. Whatever Gabe's algorithm does, it seems to point mostly to TechCrunch, VentureBeat, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo and that ilk. Nothing wrong with that. But as of this morning, the only individual bloggers I see on the leaderboard are Nick Carr, Mark Cuban, and my good friend Tom Evslin.

I’m obviously not on the Techmeme leader board and have never had a headline on Techmeme for that matter.  I likely never will.  But in truth that suits me just fine.  All this talk about "corporations taking over Techmeme” and “Individual Bloggers being Locked Out” misses one important fact: Individual Bloggers rarely make news. 

Individual Bloggers, like myself, exist to participate in the conversation not to start it.  Accordingly we are not going to be the headline because the headline, by design, documents the start of the conversation. 

Moreover, people know that. 

This is an important point: Techmeme’s headlines are an example of good UI design. When you go to Techmeme you know “Headline = Main story, Links Below = Commentary” and that’s the way it should be.  So when you take me, an individual blogger, I don’t see the harm in never having a headline to myself.  Because if people want what I’m providing, commentary, they know where to look for it. 

Which brings me to Scoble and my second point…

Fred Wilson, a Venture Capitalist based in New York, writes this morning that he’s obsessed with TechMeme and that he’s noticing changes in his obsession (he’s moving more toward Twitter and other places for his news). Oh, I grok that. I used to be obsessed with TechMeme too. Now I’m just an average user, checking in every day or two (I used to check this page every 10 minutes). What happened?

FriendFeed. See, in February I wasn’t following anyone on FriendFeed and no one was following me. Now I’m following more than 4,000 hand-picked people. More than 21,000 are following me there today — that’s better growth than I got in the first nine months of being on Twitter, by far.

I think Scoble is kind of hijacking Fred Wilson’s point here but it provided me with an interesting insight.  The irony of the FriendFeed vs. Techmeme debate, and I’m just realizing this now, is that the people who are trumpeting FriendFeed are actually running away from discussion.  They are taking refuge in a world where they only listen to those who agree with them and only visit links suggested by that group (maybe not Scoble since he subscribes to 7 gazillion people but in general)

Friendfeed is a Techmeme where only the headlines exist and the commentary comes not from the entire web but from your hand picked friends (who inevitably agree with you on almost everything).    The only difference is on Friendfeed your clique gets to make their own A-List and give them the headlines.

If you think about it, FriendFeed is the living embodiment of the echo chamber. 

So the truth is it’s Techmeme that actually keeps individual bloggers in the conversation.  Those bloggers might not get a fancy spot on the leader board or A-List level traffic but they’re out there for people who might be interested in what they have to say.  It might not seem like much but it’s a lot more than FriendFeed is offering.

Everything’s changing…just not really.  From Dan Farber of Cnet…

Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won't be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him.

Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.

He goes on to say…

Other presidents, including George W. Bush, have been similarly tracked online, but the Obama presidency brings a more finely tuned understanding to this phenomenon. Obama's pre-inauguration site, Change.gov, is providing its own play-by-play of Obama's activities, including briefly detailing the deli visit with a photo slideshow.

OK folks, a few facts here…

1.  The man’s going to be the President of the United States.  The President of the United States doesn’t step out the door without 20 cameras trained on him.  There is literally no moment in his public life that isn’t recorded on film somewhere and that’s been the case since at least FDR. 

2.  Since the advent of camera phones and tiny digital cameras the President of the United States has been subject to private citizens taking his picture no matter where he goes.  This has been the case since at least President Clinton’s second term.

3.  The “play-by-play of Obama’s activities” is called the President’s Daily Schedule and it’s released to the public and has been since I was in High School (because one of my assignment’s in High School was to request one by e-mail).  The Obama Team is publishing it online making it a tad more convenient than signing up for an e-mail distribution list but that still doesn’t make this new.

4.  Change.gov detailed the Deli visit because it was a publicity stunt and the point of publicity stunts is to generate publicity. 

Bottom line here is that nothing has really changed.  Now whenever I post something like this I get the inevitable question: what’s the point of arguing over this?  Why not just let them publish their puff piece?

Because when people like Mr. Farber get fooled by stuff like this we don’t get ACTUAL change.  Every new administration since the beginning of time has wanted to look like they were changing things in Washington.  Yet things rarely ever change.

The reason for that is because the press gets fooled into making a big deal out of nothingness which in turn gives the administration the PR boost they want and gives them no motivation to make actual changes.  The hard reality is that Governments in general (not just the U.S.) want to obscure what they are doing from the public and have no motivation to do otherwise. 

This isn’t necessarily nefarious it’s simply them wanting to work without the constant interruption of justifying themselves to a sometimes unreasonable public.  But we as the public need to fight that because if they don’t have to justify themselves than it’s easy for them to do things that ARE nefarious (or set a precedent for the next administration that will). 

Right now the Government’s of the world are winning.  They’ve become pros at obscuring what laws they are actually passing while the public just ignores them because it’s too much trouble to dig through the obscurity.  That’s why the majority of people were surprised by an economic meltdown that has been on it’s way for at least a decade.  Because they just didn’t know a lot of these non-sense laws were being passed. 

The online world could provide a remedy for that.  But not if the press continues to be dazzled by the same information they’ve always gotten in a slightly better package.

Techcrunch has a post up by guest author Matt Rutherford which itself presents commentary on Larry Lessig's appearance on the Charlie Rose show (how many names can I fit in just one sentence?).  The gist of that appearance is conveyed by this quote from Mr. Lessig...

My real fear is that the last 10 years have unleashed a kind of revolutionary attitude among the generation that will take over in 10 years. And it will be hard for them to distinguish between sensible copyright legislation and the kind that we’ve got right now. So my real fear is we’re going to lose control of this animal… I just want to reform [copyright] to make it make sense.

One of the reason's I enjoy this blog so much is because it forces me to really focus on the "how" and "why" of other people's actions.  Because I can't just make a post that says "I disagree with this" and nothing else.  So in having to write a whole post I'm forced to fully digest the opinions of those I disagree with.

I've talked at length about copyright law and how Mr. Lessig is misguided in my opinion so I won't rehash that.  What I want to look at instead is something that occurred to me when considering the "why" of his opinions. 

It's evident from the quote above that Mr Lessig believes the majority of young people are against copyright law.  But where does that belief come from?  What I've begun to grasp is how the scale of the Internet can make people think there's a huge movement going on behind them when in fact there's not.  To illustrate this let me give an example.

In 1995 the Nation of Islam orchestrated the Million Man March which was a march on Washinton D.C. designed to demonstrate support for their political agenda.  They picked that name to convey just how overwhelmingly large the group they'd gathered was (and accordingly the support for their agenda was) .  A "million men" is hugely significant when one is talking about an actual get together.

But the reason that's significant is because of the effort it takes to actually, physically come out to the march.  That level of passion indicates there is a much larger group of people just as passionate who couldn't make it.

But on the web, a million people's support is fairly insignificant.  It takes no effort at all to browse to a web site meaning even the most casual supporter would come out.  So while a million actual people represents countless millions who couldn't make it a million web supporters represents...well...a million web supporters.

Since there's not barrier to their support you get your whole support base on the web.

This disparity between the amount of support that's significant in real life and the amount of support you can find on the Internet has, imho, caused people like Mr. Lessig to think they have more support than they actually do.  Because they haven't analyzed the difference I lay out above.  That in turn leads to an unrealistic view of the world where you think a majority of people agree with the loudest contingent on the web.

A belief that is rarely the case.

The fact that Mr Lessig could think a new generation is poised to "abolish copyright law completely" is a perfect example of this.  As I've pointed out before, even young people (the most susceptible to such an opinion) seem to be just fine with copyright law.  In fact, they choose to buy from the one vendor that imposes the most stringent protection of copyright which seems to indicate they simply don't care about the issue. 

But if one were to browse Digg on any given day you'd probably think just the opposite as it sometimes seems every other post is an indictment of copyright law in one form or another.  But Digg is a international site whose entire readership consists of less than 1% of 1% of the entire population.  A number that gets even smaller when you look at the number of users who actively participate (a site like Digg may have millions of readers but only a handful of those actually contribute).

So in the final analysis you need a massive amount of web support for it to mean anything in the real world. 

Our local easy listening radio station, KOST 103.5, has a tradition of going "all holiday music" for the month leading up to Christmas.  They've done it for so long that it's become a tradition in Souther California.  No matter where people usually tune their radio it tends to stray over to KOST at some point during December.  Eventually you get to the point where KOST's Christmas Music is coming at you from all directions.

Yesterday at 8am the Christmas Music began. 

Now from a business perspective I understand why they do it this early.  Because their ratings go through the roof.  But it's always a slap in the face for me.  I love Christmas but I'm never ready for it and while I know the station is going early it doesn't stop the flashing sign in my head that says "Christmas is Here, Ready or not"

I'm not.

One of the sad ironies in life is that years go by quicker and quicker as you get older and every year at about this time I look back and wonder "is it even possible for a year to go by quicker than the last one did?"  Sadly I'm almost sure that next year I'll find that it is.

In short, Christmas time is here (give or take a few days) and while I'm sure I'll get into the spirit soon enough right now I'm feeling nothing but dread.  I am not ready for this.

Hank Williams takes on those who question change in his newest post entitled “Nothing is New”

But the larger issue is that almost invariably, with any new product there are people that will say “we have been doing that for years.”

I find these people fascinating.

It’s the kind of people that claimed that C was not new because they had been programming in assembler for years. It is the people who claimed there was no need for graphical operating systems because we already had the “oh so much better” command line. It is the people (like cmdrTaco on Slashdot) who claimed that there was no difference between the iPods and the earliest music generation.

I think there’s a larger point here and I think it’s one of the most important points in product design.

To my eyes the average person’s life doesn’t change all that much from product generation to product generation.  Successful products are those that build on their immediate predecessor and in doing so fit into the user’s existing world view.  But over time those incremental improvements in products are what lead to significant changes in people’s lives.

So take the music example.  At first the radio was a huge device that took several pieces of equipment and which was too big to be carried around.  But as soon radios got small enough to carry around people inevitably took them places.  Which is when you got “boom boxes” with handles to allow them to easily be carried.  Then came walkmans which allowed you to carry your music in a much smaller package and that eventually led to iPods which allow you to carry all your music around in an even smaller package. 

So while Mr. Williams is right in pointing out the dramatic difference between the “earliest music generation” and an iPod  it should be noted that the change happened in incremental steps with each step making a small improvement over the one that preceded it. 

This distinction is the difference between the “revolutionary product that’s ahead of it’s time but which never gets widely adopted” and the product that takes the world by storm.   To put it in tech terms it’s Windows 3.1 vs. the Original Mac.  The Original Mac was far superior but Windows 3.1’s incremental approach is what won the day.  Then Microsoft continually implemented small improvements to Windows which allowed them to beat a vastly superior product for decades.

So while the people who claim things never change might be annoying they’re also a good indicator that you’re on the right track.  Because what they’re sensing is the fact that your product fits into the average user’s existing knowledge base and that’s exactly where you want to be. 

I’ve often talked about the blogosphere living in it’s own little world but this caught even me by surprise.  Did you realize that President-Elect Obama has only once publicly mentioned the “National CTO position” and it was while giving a speech at Google in March? 

A friend told me that and it absolutely blew me away.  I didn’t even believe him.  I went on a Google Search and found pretty much the same result (he’s mentioned it in two science related interviews but as far as public remarks there was nothing)

Looking at the Tech Blogosphere you’d think it was a top priority for the new administration but in reality it barely appears to be a blip on the Radar.