The power of tweet

by Frank Paynter on July 2, 2009

“Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate goofiness?” asks Nick Carr this week at his blog, Rough Type. In partial answer he points us to Gideon Rachman’s column in the Financial Times. Mr. Rachman says, “Twitter is a compendium of banalities. But in Iran, the medium’s terseness and immediacy came into its own.”

To my knowledge, nobody has surfaced the very real and likely possibility that twitter, an intelligence service’s wet dream, was used in Iran for something nefarious. A brute force analysis of the data presented in the Web Ecology Project’s report, “The Iranian Election of Twitter” might reveal the existence of agents provocateur agitating and inciting opposition to the Persian leadership. Who benefits? There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil oil in Iran.

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140 characters is too few

by Frank Paynter on July 1, 2009

“Twitter” rhymes with “fritter” and that’s what I’ve done–frittered too much time away following other people’s interests. The stream of information is compelling, but my continuous-partial-attention time slicer doesn’t slice thin enough for me to follow your tweets while I do my stuff.

Yet online connection and conversation enriches me. It’s my intention to follow Bill Meloney’s lead back to IRC. More than 140 char, real time, meaningful engagement, no pR0n spammers…

Yesterday Bill posted this:

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I’m going back to IRC … See you there.

If you are old(er) like me you will remember the communities in IRC. You will remember the conversations. You will remember the friends…and the feuds. You will remember when groups of people talked with each other in near-real time. You will remember full sentences. But most of all you will be a member.

irc://irc.freenode.net#Pa^Patois

irc://irc.freenode.net#Joiito

irc://irc.freenode.net##Slackware

I cannot promise that I will be on all the time – I do have a real job and some semblance of a life. I can promise that if you catch me there we can share more than 140 character blurts.

Posted by William “Papa” Meloney at 7:04 AM 0 comments Links to this post

The last few years I’ve lost track of a lot of the things I value about personal web publishing and the interpersonal connectedness associated with staking a claim on my own chunk of that notional environment we call cyberspace. My bad.

Here’s a Byrds tune that comes to mind…

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Good enough, smart enough, and people like him

June 30, 2009

Al Franken has finally been declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate race. According to NPR, the State Supreme Court ruling was unanimous. Minnesota’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, has said previously that he would certify Franken if the Court directed him to do so.
Follow-up news coming soon on the Daily Show, I’m sure.
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Jennifer Balderama

June 29, 2009

[Wordnik is] “A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic ‘neighborhoods’ of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more. And it’s all compiled via user [...]

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Caveat Lector

June 27, 2009

AKMA observes that Dorothea Salo is hanging it up at Caveat Lector. Regarding her decision she says,
What’s next? I don’t know. Some things are right out; I’m not going to go pseudonymous and pop up in another corner, for example, because I just don’t roll that way, never mind that my writing style [...]

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burningbird

June 27, 2009

Shelley Powers declares her site redesign complete! She asks,
What breadcrumb could I use to tease you all into leaving the safety of your syndication feeds, to venture into the raw and wooly lands of actual web pages? With that one sentence I’ve managed to exceed 140 characters, so I’ve already broken the rhythm of the [...]

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der Bingle

June 26, 2009

bada bing… der Bingle — not just a mellifluous 20th century popular baritone, but now also a Microsoft search engine for the 21st century. Or something. It seems to work, and it gives Microsoft a fingertip grip on the ledge of internetworking, arresting their fall into the chasm of irrelevance. I searched “Cap and Trade” [...]

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At the end of your fork in the road

June 24, 2009

***** IEF XQPRSTQXL SYSPRINT OFFSET INTERRUPT *****
APPLIESTO: ALL BOOGIES, BEANERS, BOLOS & BOZOS ……
DOC BENWAY HERE ………. NURSE, SLIP ME ANOTHER AMPULE
OF LAUDANUM ………. RECOLLECT ONCE ME AND CLEM CLONE WAS CHEWIN
JOHIMBE BARK OUT BACK OF JODY’S ALL-NIGHT PET SHOP …….
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