Sexy Tweets

Image via Wikipedia

How can you sex up your Tweets?

It can be hard sometimes getting what you want said into 140 characters – particularly when you bear in mind that you’re actually closer to 120 characters if you want to get retweeted and 110 characters if you’re tweeting a link to something (which is the purpose of a great many Tweets). So how can you not only get your point across but also get it across so that people actually take notice of what you're sharing?

Here, in no particular order, are ten sexy Tweet tips.

1) Think like a newspaper – you’re writing a headline, so write in the present tense and in the language of urgency. Take out any waffle and stick to hard fact. Don’t do ‘man assaulted his dog by biting it’ but ‘man bites dog’. Tweets are great for practising headline writing!

2) Where possible and appropriate, use action words rather than passive ones, smashes, punches, kicks, breaks, shoots and that sort of thing.

3) Cut out prepositions (at, by, with, from, etc). You can always write around needing them, usually by re-forming the sentence in a more active way. ‘The Government has signed a big deal with the traffic authority’ becomes ‘Government signs traffic deal’. And so on.

4) Cut out articles, too – the definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) alike. ‘Durban to hold an ice skating championship for the first time’ becomes ‘Durban ice skating championship first’.

5) Adjectives are evil. Even the most awful sub knows that every time you use one in a headline, God kills a kitten. And it’s the same for Tweets, so avoid describing things (broad market, blue pony, ephemeral memory – the first word in each of these describes the thing it refers to and is unnecessary in the punchy language of headline or Tweet writing) unless it’s crucial to the meaning of your Tweet (which is, incidentally, highly unlikely).

6) Think about your followers and what they’re likely to be interested in. If you’re tweeting a link, you’ve already thought ‘the guys’ll be interested in this one’ but prioritise – what’s the over-riding biggie in there? Lead with that, the most colourful and impactful aspect of the link, not with an attempt to provide a deep analysis. The link will give the facts, you’re just looking to make sure people get why the link matters. A little extrapolation can help here – what will this move, fact or conclusion mean down the line, what will it lead to? You can do this by using a question, for instance, ‘MS Signs Bing Twitter Deal: Real Time Search a Reality?’

7) Do you need a hashtag? Hashtags make subjects easy to search and flags your Tweets as part of a conversation around a topic. I’m sure there’s a statistic somewhere for this, but the vast majority of Hashtags never get used beyond a few Tweets. If you do decide you need a hashtag, make it as short and yet unique as possible. One hashtag should do it - if you’re thinking of flagging a Tweet with two or more hashtags, take the hard road and drop the extras.

8) I’ve been interested by the evolution in the way we use emoticons and after a discussion around this with the team at Spot On Towers, I’ve started using emoticons as punctuation, rather than in addition to punctuation. It does rather go against the literary grain, but it cuts down on characters and ‘clutter’ too.

9) Use a link shortener. TweetDeck and other Twitter clients have automatic link shorteners, but my favourite is TweetBurner’s Twurls because it gives you statistics regarding how many people clicked through your link, when and so on. This means you can tell which Tweets are, in fact, most relevant to your followers – and if you’re Tweeting for work, gives you metrics.

10) Last but by no means least, apply the DIGAFF filter. (Do I Give A Flying) If you care about something you’re sharing, other people will. If you’re just passing something on that might be of interest to someone, it’s probably not worth passing it on. Also take a second to make sure that you’re not the 200th person to share that same fact! If you’re consistently sharing punchy, witty and relevant Tweets that link to cool stuff I, for one, want to follow you!

Billion Dollar Baby

It’s less than four years old, something like 40% of new sign-ups to it don’t last longer than a month before wandering away and it hasn’t generated a red cent in revenues. And yet last Friday, venture capitalists invested a reported $100 million into Twitter, effectively valuing the fledgeling company at $1bn – more than General Motors was worth when it went bust.

Another way of looking at it would be to value every single tweet ever tweeted at $1 - Twitter recently went past the billion tweet barrier.

With something like 54 million visitors a month and a goal, according to documents leaked to TechCrunch, of netting a billion users by 2013, Twitter certainly captures a lot of eyeballs. That billion user figure isn't ridiculous, BTW - Twitter's already smashed its own growth targets. And it’s eyeballs that make all the difference in today’s Adword world – Google's annual revenues of $21bn-odd are made up in the vast majority of clicks – each netting a few cents. Those revenues, to put them into perspective, are worth something like a sixth of global annual television advertising revenue and are also equivalent to total US print advertising spending - the latter falling as fast as Internet advertising spend is rising.

With much speculation as to how Twitter is actually going to make any money, some form of advertising is top of most pundits’ agendas. The documents leaked to TechCrunch appear to show that Twitter isn’t really quite sure what to do with the goose it has found itself holding. And despite that goose never having laid an egg, some smart money is betting that when it does, it’ll be gold.

What makes Twitter neat is that its open APIs mean that lots of smart people are dreaming up new ways to use all those eyeballs – there’s a long list of things you can do with Twitter that don’t actually involve Tweeting at all. You can share files, music, pictures, video or links, even make payments - that last link is a service called TwitPay that lets you link your PayPal account with Twitter, which means you can now buy and sell stuff with a Tweet.

So Twitter is becoming a sort of central switch for people who are talking and sharing stuff, a way of flagging up the availability of news, information and content. And, in fact, that's how many of us are now using Twitter - to share information, links and stuff we find interesting.

The stuff itself isn't on Twitter - but Twitter is how we send the signal to go get it.

And that's where Google came out of absolutely nowhere to become a world-straddling colossus. Nothing we want is on Google - it's where we go to find it.

Which is why I think Twitter could be as big as Google and why I think the smart money is being, well, smart...

PS: I know, I know. To be honest, I'm not really a rabid Twitter evangelist. I just look and sound like one. It'll pass.

A Load of Twits

On the eve of Dubai Twestival, Dubai 92 Radio DJ and top celebrity Twitterer Catboy decided to announce on air that we would compile a list of Dubai's 100 Most Compelling Tweeters, so that newbies to the world of Twitter here in the UAE can kickstart their tweeting with some new and informative friends.

Given the grief caused by our last joint venture, the infamous list of Dubai's top bloggers, I've moved to a secret location for the next few days. This list is posted on Catboy and GeordieBird's Facebook fan page, which I do commend you join up to (It's linked here), but I've reproduced it here purely because people seem to have been having problems linking through to the Facebook page that the list is on.

If you're not already on Twitter but fancy giving it a whirl, sign up today at http://twitter.com, then click on each link below, start following and get lost in the world of Twits.

First of all, here are our Twitter 'handles'...

http://www.twitter.com/catboy_dubai
http://www.twitter.com/geordiebird_dxb
http://www.twitter.com/alexandermcnabb

This list is in no particular order. Here we go...

http://www.twitter.com/Dubai92
http://www.twitter.com/danindxb
http://www.twitter.com/dxbbushell
http://www.twitter.com/timeoutdubai
http://www.twitter.com/WildPeeta
http://www.twitter.com/DubaiSunshine
http://www.twitter.com/MissGoogle
http://www.twitter.com/zooberry
http://www.twitter.com/mnystedt
http://www.twitter.com/laradunston

http://www.twitter.com/derrickpereira
http://www.twitter.com/tomgara
http://www.twitter.com/PKGulati
http://www.twitter.com/gerald_d
http://www.twitter.com/TMHDubai
http://www.twitter.com/SamanthaDancy
http://www.twitter.com/dxbluey
http://www.twitter.com/Bakerlicious
http://www.twitter.com/Shufflegazine
http://www.twitter.com/Nagham

http://www.twitter.com/Masarat
http://www.twitter.com/LaraABCNews
http://www.twitter.com/Njashanmal
http://www.twitter.com/adnationme
http://www.twitter.com/Esperanca
http://www.twitter.com/drbaher
http://www.twitter.com/Rupertbu
http://www.twitter.com/Hindmezaina
http://www.twitter.com/Ammouni
http://www.twitter.com/AkankshaGoel

http://www.twitter.com/mita56
http://www.twitter.com/dubaiweddings
http://www.twitter.com/dubaiwriter
http://www.twitter.com/binmugahid
http://www.twitter.com/automiddleast
http://www.twitter.com/jengerson
http://www.twitter.com/itsdgc
http://www.twitter.com/adamflinter
http://www.twitter.com/mmm
http://www.twitter.com/Daddybird

http://www.twitter.com/darkrangerN
http://www.twitter.com/Naseemfaqihi
http://www.twitter.com/Disruptiveplay
http://www.twitter.com/Dubailife
http://www.twitter.com/Sandman84
http://www.twitter.com/scdxb
http://www.twitter.com/Lhjunkie
http://www.twitter.com/Dobror
http://www.twitter.com/Mspwetty
http://www.twitter.com/Seodubai

http://www.twitter.com/Bahdobian
http://www.twitter.com/giorgiotedx
http://www.twitter.com/bhavishya
http://www.twitter.com/Ttoukan
http://www.twitter.com/acp_dxb
http://www.twitter.com/i_am_roo
http://www.twitter.com/nadvethosp
http://www.twitter.com//nikkington
http://www.twitter.com/cathe2ine
http://www.twitter.com/BilliBoysClub

http://www.twitter.com/Hellwafashion
http://www.twitter.com/absoluteleela/
http://www.twitter.com/nejomo/
http://www.twitter.com/zeashanashraf/
http://www.twitter.com/MariamUAE/
http://www.twitter.com/disruptiveplay/
http://www.twitter.com/T_in_DXB/
http://www.twitter.com/InterConDFC
http://www.twitter.com/mikepriest

http://www.twitter.com/Modhesh
http://www.twitter.com/SpotOnPR
http://www.twitter.com/fanofamd
http://www.twitter.com/Mich1Mich/
http://www.twitter.com/SabaFaghihi/
http://www.twitter.com/johndeykin/
http://www.twitter.com/felixsim/
http://www.twitter.com/CampaignME/
http://www.twitter.com/PeteDubai

http://www.twitter.com/maxindubai
http://www.twitter.com/fastidiousbabe
http://www.twitter.com/natapak
http://www.twitter.com/dorksterdave/
http://www.twitter.com/dubaiexplorer
http://www.twitter.com/cyberfruit/
http://www.twitter.com/samarowais
http://www.twitter.com/fouadm
http://www.twitter.com/hotelemarketer
http://www.twitter.com/CarringtonMalin

http://www.twitter.com/WooKim
http://www.twitter.com/jamesEd_me
http://www.twitter.com/nightlinedxb
http://www.twitter.com/ahlanlive
http://www.twitter.com/jane_roberts
http://www.twitter.com/meredithcarson/
http://www.twitter.com/youseftuqan/
http://www.twitter.com/PrincessKlara
http://www.twitter.com/Clive_Temple
http://www.twitter.com/Kshaheen

Your news is my news now...

Image via Wikipedia

An interesting piece filed by AP today on 'social netiquette', talking about the increasing problems of how we manage information in this online, socially overloaded, on demand world of ours. There are some good examples of people losing control of their news as others Tweet or Facebook it - so that other friends and family are upset to find out about important events online rather than in person. It's here.

I've posted before about the problem of journalists combing Facebook for information about you when you die (here, in fact) - just one of these new ways of behaving we're all finding out about as we all experiment with the media and its consequences. And I was talking the other day to someone whose mother found out from Facebook about his engagement being broken off - one reason he refuses to go near it now.

There are an increasing number of examples of people having reason to deeply regret something they've done on social media, with often life-changing consequences. And yet a recent Spot On Twitter poll found that many people still re-Tweet links they see on Twitter without actually checking them out. That urge to get to the story first is something most journalists will understand - and the need to stop for a second and assess what you are sharing and the potential consquences of that sharing is also something that journalists will not only appreciate, but have evolved practices to manage. Social media hasn't - yet.

It's going to take a little less haste and a little more thoughtfulness from people in general in future. I do believe we are going to see the evolution of accepted ways of using social media - that thinks like Tweeting other people's news will become unacceptable. But it's such a fast-moving environment, there are gong to be a lot of breakages on the way.

The trouble is that, even when we take care, we all make mistakes - it's just that those mistakes are now incredibly, indelibly public.

Tweet!

Just in case you didn't know, Dubai's Twestival event, one of the world-wide Twestivals being held in over 200 countries between the 10th-13th September, takes place at Jam Jar, the funky gallery space thingy in Al Qouz, this coming Saturday (the 12th September) from 8pm. There's a map to Jam Jar here, BTW.

Correcting Emirates Business 24x7's muckle-headed report yesterday citing the Abu Dhabi Twestival as being the first held in the Emirates, this will be the second Twestival event in Dubai - the first was held back on the 12th February.

Like the first Dubai Twestival, this event will have charitable fund-raising in mind, although this time the global events are being dubbed 'Twestival Local' and are raising money for local charities. In this case, funds raised from the event will go to the Dubai Autism Centre.

If your idea of fun isn't a room-full of steaming twits, I can quite sympathise. But Twestival's in a good cause, brings together a surprisingly wide and diverse audience of interesting people and is a good place to guage what's going on with this fast-growing and increasingly useful social media platform and, indeed, social media in general.

Pre-registration is a must as the event is almost certainly going to be full. Registration opens today, so I'd get in early while you can. You can get more information and register for the event on the official Twestival website here.

Tweet!

Trust

Image via Wikipedia

Many journalists working for 'traditional' or 'mainstream' media have been arguing about social media, particularly Twitter and its lack of dept, context, analysis or comment. There's also an argument that social media platforms (blogs, Twitterings, Wikis, Forums) don't necessarily derive the truth in quite the balanced and reliable way as a trained journalist.

There's a counterpoint to that, with respected journalists taking to online like whale sharks to aquariums and aiming to apply the (admittedly somewhat idealistic) standards of journalism to that environment. I'd argue it's easier for journalists to do that - and do it well - because online doesn't put the same pressures of proprietorial, commercial and reputational restrictions on the practice of the profession as 'traditional' media such as newspapers do.

The argument that we need journalism to filter the raw content out there is a seductive one, but it sadly flies in the face of increasing evidence that the filters are broken - and that we are actually happier filtering the stuff we are interested in ourselves. That's doesn't necessarily mean we want to filter everything ourselves, just the stuff we're interested in. And the more interested we become, the more it becomes apparent that the filters aren't quite what they're claiming to be.

Here's a great example. Emirates Business 24x7 today reports that 'Emiratis go online against Harvey Nichols'. Now, for those of you wot doesn't know, UK top-end retailer Harvey Nichols has been accused of putting a t-shirt on sale that depicts a bulldog standing on a UAE flag.

This is not generally considered to be a clever thing to do - in fact, whoever authorised putting the damn thing on sale should be considered dangerously incompetent and, at the least, keel-hauled.

"Emiratis have organised a campaign on Facebook and Twitter to boycott Harvey Nichols in response to an offensive T-shirts for which they were also pulled up by the authorities." trumpets EmBiz24x7, albeit in an unconscious echo of Churchill's famous "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put"

The story is clear, no? There's a significant grassroots movement of furious Emiratis against the retailer. Except the story, suspiciously, doesn't quantify 'the movement'.

In fact, when we look beyond the headline, and the story underneath it, EmBiz24x7's story is stood up on a Facebook group of 21 members with 2 wall posts. I can't find any evidence of a concerted campaign on Twitter, searching for Harvey, Harvey Nichols and HarveyNichols - and there are no Tweets bunched under #HarveyNichols, while the #UAE hashtag features no Harvey Nicks but quite a bit of Etisalat's BlackBerry PR triumph.

In fact, the reader is not given the information to make up his/her own mind about the relevance, force or weight of this online campaign. Given access to that information (for instance, the data I have surfaced in this post) we'd all file the story (wouldn't we?) under 'non story why are you wasting my time with this?' - the very filtering that is supposed to be taking place on our behalf, no?

Tags: Shoot. Foot. Self. Media.

Marwa. Mainstream Media Fail? AGAIN?

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Egyptian Marwa El Sherbiny lived in Germany with her husband. Subjected to verbal abuse by a Russian man, Alex M, because she wore a veil, Marwa eventually took legal action against him. She was in the courthouse in Dresden when the man walked across the room and stabbed her 18 times with a knife he had brought into the coutroom. She died in the attack.

Marwa was pregnant.

Her husband rushed to help her, but he was shot by a policemen who apparently mistook him for the attacker. Having spent three days in a coma, he is currently in intensive care.

The man who stabbed Marwa is to be charged with murder. Early reports on Bild apparently said that the charge would be one of manslaughter. Interestingly, the vast majority of reader comments on the Bild website were horrified at the crime and how the man could have been allowed into the courtroom carrying a weapon.

The Guardian, finally, tells the story here. The incident took place on Wednesday last week and I picked it up when colleague Mai tweeted the news. Her first tweet on it came on Thursday (sparked by a tweet she had received linking to a report on Egyptian blog Bikya Masr) and was part of a growing tide of horrified Tweets from around the world reporting the incident. The horror expressed was both at the crime and at the way mainstream media appeared to be largely ignoring the incident - outside local German media such as Bild, which carried a report on its website the day the attack took place - there were no files from the major European newspapers and nothing from news agencies, either. Reuters, in fact, didn't file until Sunday 5th July, when it deigned to release a picture story caption showing protestors holding placards that said things like 'Our blood is red too, not cheaper than yours'.

As Bikya Masr points out quite correctly, European media coverage didn't break until almost a week after, when mainstream outlets started to report the protests in Egypt that took place. Those protests, as The Guardian points out, were fuelled at least in part by the way that the European media was seen to have ignored the killing. The Guardian's story, its first, was filed yesterday.

So, once again, we have news that travelled around Twitter, Facebook and blogs, the social media I talk so much about, but that was not considered newsworthy by the newspapers and TV channels that form 'mainstream media'.

At a time when the debate in Europe over women wearing the veil has been refreshed and brought into sharp relief by comments such as those made by Nicola Sarkozy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that a horrific murder committed IN a courtroom against a pregnant woman because she was veiled would be 'newsworthy' - the many people around the world who picked up the story from social media sources certainly thought so.

Now, a week later, we are seeing coverage of the protests - those comforting images of screaming zealots in the streets chanting for revenge that help people in Europe to 'understand' the Middle East.

The real question is why we didn't get to see that a gentle woman was killed in cold blood last week, when it happened. It took Twitter and blogs to tell us about that.

PermaTweet

This is my Twitter on Paper. I'm oddly proud of it.

It's not actually on paper, it's via JPG, but it's part of the same project by the deliciously oddball New York designer Sam Potts. The idea was to send people a paper version of Sam's Tweets on request. No money or other emolument required, a simply one-way service that made selected Tweets enduring and gave them permanence (Tweets are not archived beyond 48 hours).

It took off so quickly and widely that a JPG based overseas service was introduced. I got in there just before Sam got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests for this very strange and almost completely useless Twitter-based service and had to stop providing Tweets made permanent on request.

Is this art? Is it rock and roll? Is it promotion?

I'm not entirely sure...

Tortuous

Image via Wikipedia

Here's something I think is worth sharing. It came to me (and therefore to you) by a tortuous route, I found the link on a comment to an article on Australian marketing uber-blog, Mumbrella (sorry Tim, can't be arsed with the caps and things). But that's how the Internet works, no?

It's the story of how the UK's Guardian newspaper crowdsourced a complex data mining job, using its online readers to help it sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of public records. By making the whole exercise accessible and enjoyable to the public, The Guardian effectively managed to arrange for something like 35,000 people to help intelligently sift through over 170,000 pages of public records unearthed by the great Commons Expenses Scandal. The result was that The Guardian managed to comb 170,000 pages of data in 80 hours, extracting the valuable stuff for its journalists to work on.

It's here. The site, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is a must-add for your RSS feed if you have any interest at all in the evolution of journalism in the digital age.

I love this case study because it's a really smart application of technology in the spirit of the IBM PC and the Toyota MR2 (two of my favourite things, both originally cobbled together by inspired innovators on shoestring budgets raiding their companies' parts bins). I love it because it's a witty and smart piece of journalistic initiative.

But most of all, I love it because it shows how much more powerful you are when you enlist the help of your customers in the development of your product - which means respecting your customer enough to believe they are worthy enough to begin to possibly understand the arcane intricacies of your unique and difficult profession. Calling for feedback, input, insight or participation from a wider commuinty extends your reach beyond your own organisation's staffing capabilities and brings a wider range of heads to a problem - sometimes solutions to a problem can come marvellously quickly from the uninvolved. It has the potential to broaden your capability to innovate, creates a stronger sense of connection and ownership from customers and folds marketing neatly into product development.

The article on Mumbrella was, incidentally, this one, where News Ltd's editorial director is being a goof about Twitter.

When Twitter Falls Apart

Image via Wikipedia

Some commentators are now, quite properly, pointing to the very real failings of Twitter as an ongoing news source on the demonstrations taking pace in Iran.

This chap, Maximillian Forte, link kindly provided in a comment to this post by Graeme Baker, is certainly in that camp and provides a strong and lucid viewpoint.

It's perhaps interesting to look back over events in Iran and how Twitter, as a community, responded.

In the first phase, Twitter clearly led the news agendas of mainstream media, providing on the ground witness and a diversity of updates that caught the popular imagination - including triggering the #CNNfail protest that eventually forced the channel to react publicly and defend its woeful programming in the face of an important series of events.

In the second phase, Twitter started to clog up with useless ReTweets (RTs) of stale information as the public mood drove the need to be somehow participatory. The students in Iran who had been Tweeting updates fought to keep their links to the world open, but were battling not only those who wanted to silence them but trying to have their voices heard in the babble.

With the almost hysterical outbreak of wannabe participants came disinformation - calls to change your location to Tehran to protect the student Tweeters meant that now anyone could 'Tweet from Tehran' - and so more chaff joined the flow of information. That was made worse by a call to remove the ID of anyone you RTed in order to protect them - effectively depriving any information of a source.

If you weren't in the game early or close to people on the ground, and therefore following the right people, by now you were getting some pretty duff information - and fifteenth hand information, at that.

Phase three has been the complete breakdown of Twitter as a news source. The 'turn your avatar green' movement is a symptom of this. Vested interest has meant that clear disinformation is now being sewn into Twitter, with Tweets claiming that Arabs have been brought into Iran, stabbing people's sisters and so on.

But then Twitter was never meant to be a news resource and, I think most people would agree, can not be relied upon as a news resource beyond the fact that, as a platform, it lets fresh eye witness news travel fast. That first phase is where Twitter is potentially solid gold and where it has indeed led news agendas - not only inTehran, but also in the Mumbai bombings and other incidents.

Once it descends into fads and conversation, there is no news value in Twitter - as, indeed, there is rarely news value in conversations. That's just chattering - what the service, in fact, was built to do. Pointing to the chattering then squeaking about how useless Twitter is doesn't mask the fact that Twitter brought the streets of Iran to the desktops of millions of people across the world.

And CNN didn't.

Wheels Within Wheels

Part of this week's rich debate around Twitter and social media has been about who you can trust online.

That's an interesting debate when you take the 'turn your Twitter avatar green' service that a number of Twittering types have started to use. The idea's nice and simple - a one-click process via the helpiranelection website will turn your avatar green so that you can demonstrate your support for Mousavi's backers in their call for a recount.

The chap behind helpiranelection is Arik Fraimovich. When he's not helping people to show solidarity with Iranian political movements, he's a software developer. I have to note that, while he is not now, he has previously worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defence. That doesn't mean to say he is aligned to the MoD or is in any way carrying out its will. But the fact that an Israeli with government links is behind a 'back Mousavi' Internet scheme will sit uncomfortably with many in the Arab World, let alone in Iran itself.

I am quite, quite sure that Arik's idea was well intentioned. But 'going green' is, I think, an Iranian choice to make.

Thanks to 'Party Boy'... :)

Is Mainstream Media DOOMED?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Does the fact that social media has been leading the coverage of the Iranian protests mean the end of MSM, or mainstream media?

My post yesterday attracted a couple of interesting comments from The National’s Jen Gerson and Insurgency Watch’s Christopher Allbritton. Both are highly respected journalists with ‘form’. Jen’s points also led to a thought-provoking post on her blog last night.

So, to continue the conversation, I thought it might be worth taking their points as a Q&A...

Tonnes of the #iranelection tweets were rehashed MSM coverage
A lot of people were retweeting links to MSM pieces, yes. But if you were following close or primary sources, you were also getting the voice of people on the ground. Some of those voices, incidentally, are suspect. You have to take care over who you’re following and how much salt you take with each report. The skill in that is little more or less than a journalist would use to balance sources – and I do think that many people today have a refined enough news sense and awareness of the Internet to be able to make those judgements by themselves. We're big boys and girls now...

Having said that, a guide to decent breaking news is no bad thing - there are a lot of people out there Tweeting links to things that engaged or amused them - and when you start including hashtags, you have a good contextual stream. If you follow the right people, BTW, you get a better editorial pick than if you follow less acute observers. The choice, you will see, is in who you choose to follow. Same with journalism, same with newspapers. I read Jen because I like her writing and find it insightful. I follow @catboy_dubai 'cos he's a pal and is amusing. I like @deafmuslim because she’s a great writer and quite potty – and challenges my view of things. I choose not to read Germaine Greer any more. I loathe the Daily Mail. My choice of, errr, 'media'.

The awesome pics are from wire services
Images from wire services? Yes, of course. They're the images that most Middle East newspapers will use because they haven't got their own snappers on the ground. So I'll take a Tweet of a Getty/Reuters pic today over waiting until tomorrow

But there were also a lot of important images that weren’t wire service stuff. Like this image, for instance, that struck me so much. BTW, at the moment itself I don’t think we’re looking at sourcing halfway decent images – we’re looking at witness report that tells the story. Quality is not the benchmark.

Verifying information doesn’t mean waiting for a second Tweet. It means calling round sources or being an eyewitness yourself.
Although I am, by dint of my own background as a journalist and writer, minded to agree, I also think we’ve moved on a little. While there is undoubtedly room for sober, reflected, contextual analysis (something we see all too little of, BTW, in our regional media as well as international media) there is also room to take the stream of eye-witness report and form a view from that. If you’re seeing 30-40 people on Twitter saying that police are hitting the rioters hard and then getting Tweets detailing injuries, the flow of events would tend to suggest a measure of reality coming from the ground. Combined with real-time reports from newswires or other sources, you’ve got the story in front of you, but the story presented in a way that no broadcaster can equal – eye witness accounts of events unfolding, real people, real emotion, real reaction.

I do think that MSM often fails to meet that standard of journalistic integrity, BTW. Again, particularly in our region, good, balanced reporting that takes the facts, challenges them and searches for balance, completeness and the three sides to the story (yours, mine and the other guy’s) is often notably lacking.

Disinformation is a problem with crowdsourced media
Agree – because you’re actually in the crowd and so you’re as prone to each new rumour and report that’s coming through. Which is why, going back to your first point, it’s vitally important that we DO have people like Reuters and AP on the ground. Or people like yourself or Christopher. But that’s journalism, not media. I have RSS feeds of the major newswires and get the stories as they break. So I can verify the big stuff – which gives credence to the little stuff. And so I can quickly build a picture of which Twitterers are ‘on the money’ if I want to.

But this comes down to the point, I think. I don’t need CNN or Sky to see what’s happening – in fact, the whole #CNNfail thing was about thousands (tens of thousands) of people feeling strongly that CNN’s editorial judgement was deeply flawed in not affording these events top line coverage. I think many news outfits were unprepared, under-resourced and under-educated on the whole Iran story. So what's better, a young, unprepared cub journalist pitched into covering the Tehran story from the Dubai bureau, or witness reports from on the ground?

By the way, I will never forget seeing journalists in my hotel in Amman reporting 'from the Iraqi border' during the Iraq invasion. Not all journalism is bad, but the really woeful stuff has dented public faith in the credibility of journalism a great deal. And no, I don't like that at all.

Blogging triumphalists don't give us enough credit
I don’t much like the tag ‘blogging triumphalist’, you’ll probably be unsurprised to know. I and many, many other people I know feel that we are not being well served by ‘legacy’ or mainstream media. But it’s the media I’m talking about – not journalism. Journalism online can positively thrive, Christopher himself is a brilliant example of that and I’ll add my two personal favourites, AdNation’s Eliot Beer and mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows. Both are former print journalists who have taken their work online and who are part of a richer, faster, more agile and more diverse online media that are winning people’s eyeballs because they give us what we want, how we want it and when we want it.

The crucial difference is that we can select what streams interest us. We can follow the people whose work engages us, whether they’re bloggers, Twitterers, photojournalists, writers or videographers.

And, by the way, one of those streams is wire services – the very same ones that fill the majority of the white space on the dead trees that are shoved into the hotel rooms, houses and offices of disinterested readers all over the Middle East every day. I don’t need to wait until tomorrow to read a watered down version of Reuters’ piece on Tehran, it’s on my desktop in two seconds thanks to RSS. And the pictures, too. AND the eyewitness reports that flesh out my own personal understanding of, and emotional attachment to, what's going on.

Twitter is one part of this emerging new media story, one of the information streams open to us thanks to the Internet. As consumers, we are increasingly using these information streams to customise and streamline the content we believe is relevant to us.

We don’t need translators or people to hold our hands and give us the context that we, poor mortals, are too dumb to seek ourselves. And if that’s journalism’s defence (I do not believe it should be, BTW), then God help journalism.

Twitter 1 MSM 0

Image by inju via Flickr

Yesterday was interesting. Twitter once again ruled the news agenda of mainstream media (MSM) networks as the world's editors finally woke up to the fact (where have you been, CNN?) that something enormous, potentially agenda-changing and highly significant was unfolding in Iran.

From the beatings of students in their dormitories (a story that broke on Twitter, with Twitpics of damaged dorms and bruised students) through to the unfolding 'is it on is it off' drama of the march on Tehran by the green banner-waving opposition crowd (some estimates had it at 2 million and more), the news was happening on Twitter significantly ahead of coverage on the MSM.

This meant that major outlets such as CNN, ABC, Sky and the BBC were all reduced to referencing Twitter in their coverage. The actual Twitter output was massive, reaching several tweets a second going into the late afternoon, and the feeds started to get confusing with rumours spreading and people tweeting and retweeting new information almost regardless of its source. A colossal number of people used Twitter, blogs and Facebook to follow events in Iran yesterday simply because the traditional media failed so badly in understanding that we care about this news. It was a massive editorial misstep that you could argue was only avoided by the BBC which with its Persian service, was at least trying to stream live from the streets.

The news media on the ground, under-resourced, restricted and rightly fearful in the face of baton-wielding nasties in and out of uniform (Take a look at this chilling image of, I understand, government Basij militia from yesterday afternoon) simply couldn’t keep up with the flow of witnesses on the ground. Some quite organised student groups were using mobiles to text news from the crowd back to Twitterers who stayed online using their dial-up connections and switching proxy servers to keep trying to get the news through. It reminded me a little of Salam Pax, the Iraqi blogger who kept information coming out of Baghdad in the face of the American invasion and Iraqi resistance.

Problems

This stream of information from a confused, dangerous and yet highly important series of events on the ground raises a number of problems. The first of these is provenance. How do you KNOW you’re watching a Twitter feed from a genuine Iranian student and not a hoaxer or, even worse, state-owned instrument of instability. For instance, a foreign intelligence outfit could quite nicely stoke up international concern and damaging coverage by pretending to be a witness – and we’re all credulous enough to take the bait because, let's face it, we want to see social media beating up the MSM.

So how do we know you’re real?

My own personal test is a website or blog. If the Twitterer links to one of those, you have the chance to have a quick browse and test an established track record and a history of conversation. Another test is personal relationship – if someone with whom I have an established online relationship can vouch for the new contact, then I’ll usually take that as a bona fide contact. And another is longevity - I prefer sources that were online and have a track record before the events in question took place.

Keeping a cool head can be hard in the face of the excitement, but there’s nothing worse than finding yourself accused of blindly repeating BS – or being unhelpful in your attempts to help. For instance, at the height of yesterday’s events, people were retweeting lists of alternative proxies. That was cluttering up the stream and generally getting in the way. If you’re based in North America and have no Iranian friends, retweeting a proxy server with an #iranelection hashtag is hardly going to add utility to the conversation, for instance.

Some MSM pundits were pointing out that the information on Twitter wasn’t reliable. I thought it was. Following the couple of simple rules above and waiting a little to have news confirmed by multiple sources, I got compelling information and images from on the ground witness sources often hours before the broadcast media.

The other thing I found interesting about yesterday was that the audience was self-selecting. Those of us that cared – because we have Iranian friends, relations, business interests or any other tie to the events in Tehran – could select the information we wanted and decide how we wanted to receive it. We could dip into the story for an update whenever we wanted, dedicating the appropriate measure of time we all wanted to give to updating ourselves. No advertising breaks, no filler stories about Ping Pong the panda and her lovely babies and no celebrity guff about Paris Modhesh or the like (you still there CNN?) getting in the way.

Was yesterday a great day for social media? Yes. Was it a worrying day for ‘traditional media’? Without a doubt, yes. Does this mean MSM is dead? I don’t think so. But I do think it’s a very clear signal that we are in a time of immense change and if big business news organisations don’t get it together fast, they’re going to get hit, hard.

People are finding a faster, fresher, more vibrant, immediate and real source of news and information. It's other people.

Iran Media Coverage Fail

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Watching Sky News over the weekend just reinforced my growing irritation with ‘traditional’ media. There’s a big bust up over budget caps in Formula One racing and Ferrari, among others, is playing hardball with F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone – a news item repeated constantly through the weekend. At no point did anyone explain what the bust up was actually about. The repetitive coverage of the same news file means we never drill down into the story and so I end up having to Google it to find out the answers to my obvious questions - the questions, incidentally, of journalism 101 - what, where, why, when, who, how?

Similarly, there’s no analysis of Mousavi’s role in the Iranian elections, no depth on offer at all, just a number of sound bites filmed with over-excited girls in hijab. And so I have to Google him, too, to get the background I feel I need to form my opinion.

By Saturday afternoon, I've given up watching repeats of Tim and Ashish and I’m getting my Iran election news from Twitter – a good selection of opinions, breaking news and links to better and more in-depth sources than Sky. I’ve not even got a Twitterfall going on it, that’s just the commentary from Tweeple. And the Iranians among them are sharing links to articles that reinforce and deepen my knowledge of the elections, widening my horizons and engaging my (I admit, unusually active) curiosity.

Amanda Knox is standing trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher. That one’s repeated again and again, but there’s no coverage of her actual testimony. Whatever happened to the boyfriend? Again, Sky ain’t telling. Googled.

So I'm getting my news analysis from search, from Twitter and from online news sources. And increasingly I'm getting my news from these sources, too. Because Sky, an important UK news provider, simply isn't giving me the news I want with the information, intelligence and drill-down I want.

Increasingly, I’m finding that my, and others’, curiosity is finding itself satisfied by online sources and not news media. Other people are asking the same questions and the answers are easier to find online through social sites, searching news sites, using RSS. I’m getting more depth of information, a broader reach of public opinion – both international and local to the event – and talking to people about stuff as it develops.

This morning there’s a new Twitter hashtag - #CNNfail – and it's a top 'trending topic' on Twitter, a reaction from thousands of people using Twitter who are learning more about the elections and subsequent riots there from Twitter than they are from CNN - which has been apparently failing completely to cover the entire process.

As traditional newspapers continue to struggle, many depending on newswires that consumers are perfectly able to read for themselves and unable to deliver the breadth of witness, comment and opinion available to us online, I do wonder how long it will be before we finish with this pointless journalism/bloggers debate and recognise that our news media is changing in a fast and fundamental shift that will wipe out many of the less agile players.

A Small Personal Hell

Image by Dave Delaney via Flickr

For a couple of weeks now, I have been getting the same joke appearing with increasing frequency in my 'Tweet Deck'.

Tweet Deck is a really cool application that lets you monitor several Twitter conversations or 'feeds' - you can search for, say, your company name and then you'll see any Tweet that mentions your company. It's pretty useful for taking a look at the conversation, both looking out for topics that engage you as well as for professional reasons such as reacting to customers or other stakeholders in your company/client company.

For what it's worth, many people I knew that could make no sense whatsoever of Twitter found that it all suddenly made sense when they used Tweet Deck.

But this damn joke was missing me. Every time I read it, I got more and more worried about my lack of a sense of humour. I just couldn't for the life of me see it. I know I'm dense, but that dense, really?

A couple of days ago I told someone about the joke that made no sense - and as I said it out loud, the clouds lifted and sunshine enveloped me. At last, I understood. But it's the most crap joke in the world and, because I have a Twitter feed set up for the UAE OR Dubai OR Abu Dhabi, every time anyone anywhere in the world tells this awful (and increasingly popular) joke on Twitter, I get to see it again. And again. And again...

Don't mention the Flintstones in the United Arab Emirates. Apparently those in Dubai dont get it, but those in Abu Dhabi do!!

It's like a small personal hell...

Twits

This Thursday will see the global Twestival event taking place in Dubai. Over 175 countries all over the world are having simultaneous events to celebrate the fine art of Twittering. All you have to do is be a user of the micro-blogging social networking phenomenon and this year’s biggest new thing since Marmite rice crackers.

Why bother?

Well, I can see there’s a downside to getting stuck at the upper deck of Dubai’s Barasti Bar on a Thursday evening with upwards of a 140 early adopters, geeks, nerds, social networking gurus (they’ll be the ones in towels) and neologists. But there’s an upside, too.

Twitter’s damn useful. It started as a social application which aimed to give you a 140 character space to answer the question ‘What are you doing right now?’ But Twitter has evolved at a remarkable pace. The underlying technology hasn’t changed so much as they way people have used it. Rather like SMS, Twitter has taken on a life of its own.

The Dubai Twestival venue was itself sourced and booked using Twitter, which can move information at remarkable speeds. In fact, Le Meridien Mina Seyahi (@minaseyahi) became a sponsor of the event - again, through Twitter. And so did Virgin Megastores (@virginmegame)!

Crowd-sourcing (Anyone know where I can get tickets to the Dubai Twestival?), customer service (I hate HSBC! "Hi. This is HSBC. What’s the problem?" - OK, so that example's a pipe dream, but you get what I mean. Companies like Comcast are using it effectively), marketing ("Try this out, it’s cool") and sharing ideas, information, updates, tips and links you’ve come across are all just a sample of the many ways that people are finding Twitter is a useful and cool tool.

For what it’s worth, people, my Twitter feeds into my Facebook page and to the blog (the feed’s there, to the right hand side) and generates a very different set of responses from each of the platforms it goes to. By using TweetBurner, a natty little application that shortens URLs, I can Twurl any site I come across on the web, sharing that information with the people ‘following’ me on Twitter, my Facebook friends and even you, the rather wonderful readers of this daft wee blog.

You can respond to a ‘Tweet’ on Twitter, send and receive direct messages and ‘re-tweet’ stuff you like and want to pass on to your fellow Twitterers. By tweeting and re-tweeting, information can flow at remarkable speed and to remarkable numbers of people. Just take the recent Mumbai bombings or the Israeli incursion into Gaza, where debate and information were flowing at a blistering pace.

And then start adding in other applications for Twitter. Take a look at Blip.fm (again, there’s a ‘Blip widget’ to the right side of the blog if you scroll down), which lets you select music you like and create a playlist. Each track you pick gives you a chance to comment and that comment’s shared with anyone getting your tweets as well as people following you on Blip. It’s a great way of playing with music, sharing and discovering new stuff. There are a whole range of interesting/useful/crazy Twitter tools out there, too.

If you want to find out more, a great place to start is by registering for Twitter, which takes little more than going to www.twitter.com and clicking on ‘Join the conversation’. You could follow up by registering for Twestival here - if you want to do that, I suggest you extractez le digit, because it's nigh on full as I post this.

If you get to the Twestival and want to meet up, I'll be easy to find. I’ll be the one not wearing bottle-bottom glasses and a funny ‘arm hammering my head’ hat...

PS: And now, for your listening pleasure, that Catboy and Geordiebird interview. Don't blame me if you go ahead and click here!!!