Some more things about Twitter that the newspapers don't understand.

I liked Graham Linehan's article http://bit.ly/pPxir it saved me having to rave too much against Janet Street Porter's moronic article. But here are some more things about Twitter that the newspapers don't understand.

Twitter isn't a competitor to Newspapers

Twitter is many things, but it isn't a new service. Twitter can be a news navigation service. If I were in newspapers, the most interesting (and terrifying for the media) thing about the Iran election was the phenomenon of #CNNFail. CNN didn't initially cover the unrest that immediately followed the Iran elections. Because people can now compare news outputs from around the world, people in the US noticed this and complained about it bitterly. They also pointed to the news channels that did actually have reporters in Iran (the UK's BBC and Channel 4). Lesson for the media? Twitter can be your friend if you've got the good stuff. A point made by Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail is that historically as much money is made out of navigation as is made out of content. In the US, TV Guide nearly always made as much money as the TV networks. Yellow pages freqently made as much money as the domestic phone companies. There's gold in telling people where the good stuff is - just ask Google.

Twitter putting off its upgrade at the request of the State Department was a BAD thing not a GOOD thing.

There are many good things about the twitter style of interaction. But a lot of things about its architecture suck. Especially the fact that it's centralised - it really has no need to be. If the State Department can keep the lights on through the Iran election, maybe they can turn them off through, oh, I dunno, say the assassination of a major politician. Twitter would be much better if it had no central point of failure and projects like http://www.jaiku.com/ that try and address this issue are to be welcomed (although a project that tried to address it that wasn't owned by Google would be even more welcome).

Twitter Points at the good stuff - and the egregiously bad stuff

Janet Street Porter's article about Twitter highlights the kind of rubbish that "respected" columnists used to be able to get away with. They can't really get away with it now, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a need for really good print journalism. Just as the companies that went bust in the UK in the credit crunch - Woolworths, MFI - were the ones that everybody already new were rubbish, the newspapers (like the Independent) that will be driven out of business are the ones that everybody already knows are rubbish. Journalists are actually far better placed than most of us to generate great content - it's just that for years and years, they haven't needed to. I gave up subscribing to The Economist because, as I read their commentary on Guantanamo Bay and Obama, they were pro-torture. But I must admit that I miss it because there isn't really an easy way of getting that kind of collection of good journalism altogether in one place on the internet - except illegally downloading a PDF of the Economist from Pirate Bay.

Newspapers might be better off figuring out how to use Twitter...

...rather than just calling the people who use it rude names. This seems to be something else that the newspapers are missing. Nobody knows how to use Twitter, we're all trying to figure it out. Why not join us? You've got a lot of interesting content I'm guessing, what being newspapers and all, maybe you could point us to some of it. Janet Street Porter seemed to be dismissive of Twitter on the grounds that the people who used it were over 30 and had jobs - what's the matter? Don't you want those people to read your paper, look at your advertising?

Why I Tweet

I was reading Hannah Nicklin's (@hannahnicklin) tweets as @TWPGoSee where she dared to share some of the things that people have said about her play writing, including things like this and this.

That made me think of this post by another Twitterer Wil Wheaton (@wilw). Especially the speech attributed to Patrick Stewart.

And this poem:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
- Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night".

In Richard Bolles book "What colour is your parachute?" he says that one way to get a handle on what kind of job you should be doing is to ask yourself what sorts of thing you do that you find totally engrossing. What kinds of thing make you lose all track of time? This is of course very close to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous definition of happiness in his book "Flow". For me, one of the answers is the following process:

My Losing all Track of Time List

• Write a blog post (using http://www.blogger.com)


• Compress a link to my blog post using (http://bit.ly)


• Publicise it by posting the shortened link on (http://www.twitter.com)


• Follow the number of clicks on the link on the bit.ly dashboard


• See if anybody has responded to my post with an @message on Twitter (or even on Facebook)


• Watch out for RT's (re-tweets) on Twitter. RT's are like manna from heaven.


• Follow up the next day with http://www.google.com/analytics/

Why are RT's so important to me? All my life I've wanted to be a writer, since going through the Adrian Mole phase of wanting to be a poet age 13. And what is a writer but someone who puts down their view of the world. And what is a successful writer? Someone who puts down their view of the world and manages somehow to get that view out to an audience and get a response.

In the old, pre-internet world, only a very few people got published. So that meant that if you were going to get published you had to either be very well-connected (like Mrs Beeton - knew next to nothing about cooking but was married to a publisher) or very very good.

I'm (or at least was) very unconnected. There are a lot of writers from very similar backgrounds to mine (like Ted Hughes, Alan Bennett, Tony Harrison) but they only seem to make it out of that background by being very, very, good and very clever. So growing up I thought that my only chance of ever being a writer was to be very, very good. And every now and then I would decide I was going to write something and lo and behold, it wasn't very good. I never showed it to anybody so, as Dylan Thomas said, my words "forked no lightning".

But that is the thing that is so marvellous about the "Losing all Track of Time List" combination of actions and websites. I can write something and get some kind of response. I can fork some tiny little splinters of lightning.

A few things have got near this "RT feeling" before. When I worked as a research slave lackey punchbag assistant at several universities, the feeling of getting publications and journals accepted came close. But there were some problems with the way feedback was given in academia.

Actually a lot of the feedback you get in academia is very similar to the kind that Hannah Nicklin got.

Before blogging was invented I started writing a weekly "funny" column here. Not sure why I gave this up (you'll be saddened to know it wasn't because I realised I'm not funny) but it was probably due to lack of feedback, a very few people were visiting my site, maybe half a dozen a month. Using the Blog/twitter/bit.ly method, I can see that between 6-12 people have at least clicked on any article I post. If it gets RT'd, that can scale the heady heights of maybe 20 or 30 clicks.

Those little sparks of lightning that my words have forked keep me going.

Social Media is Just Another Conversation (and therefore not only for trendy 16 year olds)

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Glad to see that most of the people who commented on this story - http://www.more.com/5702/5513-twiiter-how-not-to-act-old-satran - thought it was rubbish.

It feeds some really insidious and damaging ideas about how the world works.

• We shouldn't act our age - we should always try appear younger than we actually are
• There is a way that you should act on social media sites like Twitter and young people know what that is and older people don't.

Both of these are wild assumptions. Why not admit your age online? I'm 40 by the way. And why assume that a bunch of 16 year olds have cracked some internet Da Vinci code that you cannot be party to?

The real truth about Social Media is that NOBODY knows how to use it, we're all blindly feeling our way. You can see this as a scary thing - as the author of this article clearly wants you to, or you can see it as a wonderful opportunity to innovate. How do people my age and background talk to each other on Twitter? How do they talk to people of other ages and backgrounds. I dunno, lets make it up!

Oh sure, there are lots of people trying to claim that they know how to use it and can teach you for a fee (or for the price of looking at ads while you read their article online). But just right now, nobody really knows.

To be honest I think this quote:

"Twitter is really all about letting other people know how savvy and well-connected and clever and plugged-in you are, all, of course, in a completely low-key, under-the-radar, provocative-yet-cool way."

Reflects more about the fears and character of the author than it does about anything that's said on Twitter.

So what if you're not savvy and well-connected? What if you do want to Twitter about something not quite so savvy and well connected? Perhaps how hard it is to cook carrots (something I've been told off for)? If this is what you want to Tweet, that communicates to us out in the Twitterverse something real about who you are. If we too have trouble cooking carrots, we may feel really close to you at that moment and decide to follow you more closely and recommend you to all of our carrot-troubled friends.

If you did try to come across on Twitter as savvy and well-connected when you weren't do you think it would work?

Of course, that doesn't mean that you don't have to prepare a "face" as T.S. Eliot wonderfully describes it. Social Media is just another conversation. Would you take your cue on how to have those solely from a 16 year old? In any conversation there are things we say, and things we don't say. But as with any conversation, the degree to which what we're saying is related to what we actually think and feel is a major factor in deciding whether other people will want to talk to us.

That'll Teach Me

One of the ways that you judge your "success" on Twitter is how often you get Re-Tweeted. If someone re-tweets something you say - sending out your message to all the people who follow them, it means that they liked it, they think it's interesting, they think their followers will think it's interesting.

I spent most of Monday trying to tweet various clever/sarcastic things and being slightly peeved when nobody te-tweeted me. Then I watched a programme about a Buddhist monk looking for the reincarnation of his spiritual leader in Tibet and Nepal. He found a baby who he thought was the reincarnation of his old master and after a series of tests, the moment came where he had to ask the parents of the boy, if they would allow him to be taken to a monastery that was miles away and be brought up as a monk. The father said something that really moved me - he said "I'm only doing this because I know he'll be working for the benfit of all sentient beings." So I tweeted that:

"Working for the benefit of all sentient beings"

and it got instantly Re-Tweeted.