The Ginger Mumbly

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?