This is in response to a commenter on Steve Gillmor’s Techcrunch post, who essentially thinks any time and bandwidth wasted on a discussion of Twitter is nonsense.

For me, the value of Twitter rests entirely in instant communication, accessible anywhere, one to many, many to one. I can get onto Twitter and not follow one single person if I want. All I have to do is fire up GTalk, ask Twitter to track some keywords, and I’m plugged into a real-time news feed.

This is a capture from my real-time Twitter stream this morning. Note particularly the last entry from corvida (one of the newest Read/Write Web contributors), whose family’s home was damaged by tornadoes ripping across the Southeast since yesterday. Corvida tells the whole story here.

This is what my GTalk window has looked like for the last 12 hours. Quiet, followed by bursts of reports of tornado outbreaks, high winds, destruction, people shouting out for help, to locate others, to find a safe place, to share their worries with other people out on the stream.

Unless you have lived through a natural disaster of the type that devastates towns and cities capriciously, you cannot understand the value of being plugged in this way. But Corvida did, and she reached out. Be sure you read her whole story. Twitter reached out in a real way and helped her family, as well as four other families who were in need of food tonight.

This can’t happen in decentralized parallel universes. Or to put it today’s political terms, we cannot have red states and blue states, and still be the United States. In Twitter, of course, there are no states; just places where people are.

The value of Twitter is its universality, which is why it cannot be decentralized; at least, not in ways similar to FriendFeed, which I like well enough as an aggregator but do not consider a place to center discussion. For me, Friendfeed is the storage device; Twitter is the capture device. It scans; Friendfeed holds.

Cliff Gerrish has a great explanation for why Twitter cannot be decentralized:

It’s tracking that makes a decentralized Twitter nearly impossible. Think of a 140 character Tweet as a series of space separated tags to which you can subscribe. In this model, you’re following everyone, or at least everyone who uses that particular tag. This feature radically changes the shape of the social graph underlying the information stream. Since you don’t know who might use a tag you’re tracking, the regular RSS style contract around publication and subscription doesn’t work. Track is not commonly used today, but it’s one of the more interesting features of the service.

While there’s a ton of irony in the content of the Techcrunch comments on Steve’s post, particularly with regard to the number of characters he used to convey his thoughts, I’d suggest that they should go back and re-read what Steve wrote, because he’s right.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tornadoes, techcrunch, steve gillmor, track, corvida

I have had at least three decent, if not inspired, ideas for blog posts this weekend. Every time I start to write them, I have to turn off the wireless modem so Sticks will give up on what he’s doing and go to bed. This is because he likes to stay up till 4 and then drag himself out of bed in the morning and drive the 35 miles to school in a sleep-deprived and groggy state. Obviously, this doesn’t work for us, so cutting off the network is the only way to keep him from being a danger to others when he drives.

That means that if I don’t get it done by midnight it might not get done at all, which is what has happened. If I actually could stop obsessing on the Pennsylvania primary and the reports around it and think about other things, I could open up all the articles I want to open before turning things off, but no…I don’t do that either.

Instead, I will say congratulations to Steve Gillmor for his new partnership with Techcrunch and the re-launch of the Gillmor Gang. Despite the relatively chaotic first show, there are golden moments, and the end is definitely causing a blog post to ferment for me. Think communities, open and closed, vibrant and dormant, online and offline. Lots of thoughts rolling around on that.

In other news, I bought a webcam and am slowly sticking my toe into trying real-time video chats and some other experiments. To that end, I spent some time tonight learning by visiting QueenofSpain’s (aka Erin) show tonight on Stickam, which is a very cool site for real-time video chat (as long as you use IE — can’t get Firefox to work right). The topics? Zappos and politics.

Still, I blame the kids for everything. It’s only right when they insist on causing me grief. It’s either that, or the fact that gas has now hit $4/gallon and I’m walking everywhere.

Technorati Tags: zappos, gillmor gang, techcrunch, rambles

If you haven’t read or heard about it, Loren Feldman (1938 Media) has a new show, which is a parody of Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhoods show, recently launched on FastCompany.tv. (Shel co-authored the book Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble in 2006).

If it were as simple as a little parody, we’d all be laughing as hard as I was at the puppet’s guest appearance on NewsGang Live today, but it’s not. This is partly because Shel Israel had not registered his own name as a vanity URL (Yes, I’ve done it for the whole family, just to reserve our little piece of the ‘Net), and Loren bought it and is using it to broadcast his shows.

Shel was understandably pissed about someone using his name on a site that wasn’t his work and said so. On Twitter. Broadcast out to everyone, which sparked a debate over personal brand, and ultimately a really thoughtful post about why he reacted as he did, what he took from the critics, and what he learned as a result. It was a truly honest response to some pretty harsh criticism.

Further complicating things, Loren’s show was picked up by a sponsor today and Shel’s hasn’t been. Yet. They are looking for one.

If peace were an objective here (though I don’t believe it is) Loren would transfer Shel’s domain namesake to Shel, buy the available ‘Fake Shel Israel’ domain (at least, available as of this writing), and continue on with what is a very, very funny parody, enjoy his success, fame and fortune.

Another possibility is the one I suggested to Robert Scoble on Twitter tonight: Shel might consider attempting a puppet-napping and interview on his own show, before handing it back in exchange for his namesake site. Or partnering with the puppet occasionally, embracing the puppet as his own, blessing the parody, not killing it.

Loren Feldman is one of those guys who runs hot and cold. His Jason Calacanis parodies were hysterical, the stuff he did over on Huffington Post, not so much. In fact, I ended up unsubscribing because they (and he) had become incredibly unfunny. And then he comes back with a raging act of genius in this puppet, yet once again hasn’t figured out (or doesn’t care) that it can be funny without being mean.

My appeal to Loren: I would enjoy the show more and the puppet even more if you settled the domain name issue. Yes, you own it. Yes, you can use it. But to me, it’s a small thing that can find a compromise solution that is less hurtful to others. It would really bother me to build up your show at Shel’s expense. Since he has made the gesture of standing down on it, perhaps there is a compromise. I hope so.

Here’s one that’s on the 1938 Media site, so I don’t feel badly linking to it. It’s my pal Steve Gillmor, trying his best to be serious:

Technorati Tags: 1938Media, ShelIsrael, Global Neighborhoods, video, puppet, Newsgang, Steve Gillmor

The photos I posted earlier today came straight to the blog from the Blackberry. They suck. That’s because the Blackberry’s camera sucks. The lens sucks, the hardware sucks. There’s no video. What there is, though, is the ability to send a picture to the blog straight from my phone on a beautiful spring morning (that’s turned somewhat dark and cloudy in the afternoon).

Amy Gahran just bought the much-ballyhooed N95 and spent the last 24 hours trying to get it set up for moblogging before the firmware update bricked it. The updates she was posting were driving me crazy — why the problems pairing bluetooth keyboards and headsets? Geez, that’s old tech, should work fine by now, you’d think. But no.

As much as I love my Blackberry, it drives me crazy that the camera sucks and that I can’t send my photos to my computer via Bluetooth because ATT has disabled the bluetooth port that would allow the connection. I can’t play YouTube videos on it (thanks again, ATT), and if I make my own little videos from concerts and the like I can’t put them on the micro-SD card and reliably play them because Windows Media wants to “fix” them first.

Even the iPhone, everyone’s darling, has features I hate. It’s not on the 3G Network (neither is my blackberry…sigh), the touch keyboard is absolutely impossible for me to use because I’m anal about spelling and can’t stand typos. The data/text/voice plan for it is ridiculously expensive, and it’s not flexible when it comes to adding any enhancements to its applications.

And then there’s Twitter. Twitter’s great on mobile — you can use GTalk or just get everything by text, assuming you’re following everyone and have turned updates on for everyone. But sometimes I’ll follow and forget to include turning their updates on, because I have this nice desktop Twitter client that picks up tweets from anyone I follow. When I switch to mobile, suddenly there’s half the tweets — what I call Twitter Lite — which is neither great-tasting nor less filling. It just sucks.

On the Blackberry, GTalk won’t shut up unless I turn off all the sound on the phone. I’ve told it six different ways from friday that I really don’t need to hear a ding every frickin’ time someone tweets, but it won’t get it. So GTalk is only a partial option for me because I can’t sit in a client meeting and have my phone ringy-dinging every two seconds. I have limited texting so GTalk is a good workaround, but for the noise.

Look, I’ve written about this before. All I want is a mobile device that I can use as a phone, take a picture that doesn’t suck and post it to my blog, take a video that doesn’t suck and send it to YouTube, read email, tweets and blog posts, and click on links from those without hanging the whole phone because someone hasn’t adapted their site for mobile (which is a LOT of sites). I don’t want to see the dreaded “502 error” that I get when clicking on a video or audio file, and I want to download the audio for Newsgang Live directly to my micro SD card and listen on my phone.

So to the mobile service providers, please stop being greedy and let me decide how use the bandwidth. Quit demanding that I pay another five bucks to watch your crappy edited video and let me watch what I want. Let me listen to what I want. Get over your control game.

To the hardware manufacturers, including Apple, figure out how to make it suck less. No firmware upgrades that brick phones (can you IMAGINE how Microsoft would be villified if they did such a thing?) Ship it right the first time, provide a pathway for upgrades that justifies anyone forking over $400-700 for a mobile device. Give me a device worth that kind of money in a world where a cheap laptop is $500.

Make it suck less and do it sooner rather than later.

(Did anyone count the number of times I used the term ’suck’? How many?)

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Blackberry, mobile, mobile web, suck less, fix it now, ATT

A Twitterstorm of sorts is flurrying around tonight. I didn’t start it but I fueled it, somewhat inadvertently. (I can hear my mother telling me I really DON’T have to jump into every conversation… or my old boss telling me I had rabbit ears that picked stuff up from three offices away, or just knowing I’m easily distracted…)

The eye of the storm is attention. Or attention deficits, maybe. From a life standpoint, this is one of my best topics — I’m a master at not paying attention, paying too much attention, or dividing my attention, depending on the day and time. In this Twitterstorm, the discussion swirls around the question of gestures — what they are, how we make them, and what they represent.

It seems easy enough, right? But it’s really not, because attention can be divided up and expressed in so many different ways. Zoning out when my daughter is talking to me is a gesture. So is choosing to ignore a tweet that yanks my particular chain. Clicking on a link dropped into Twitter is a gesture, too. All of these add up to attention. Or lack of it, depending.

All of this seems simple, but it’s not. It’s complex, particularly when put into the context of social networks. On Newsgang Live a couple of weeks ago, I tried to make the case that using favorites would be one way to weight attention on Twitter. Steve Gillmor, who has spent a ton of time thinking and writing about all of this, pointed out that using favorites is too easily gamed, because the act of making something (or someone) a favorite is an explicit gesture that can be too easily duplicated.

Before I start overthinking this too deeply and lose my own train of thought to my short attention span, I should probably turn to the little Twitterstorm. It started with Steve Gillmor telling Rob LaGesse links are dead. This is a statement Steve has made many times, but I still don’t quite understand it, beyond knowing that he means that links as a measure of attention are like favorites — they’re explicit gestures that can be gamed too easily. They can mean attention or they can mean popularity, which isn’t the same thing. In the conversation that follows in 140 character bursts, I admit to not quite bending my head around implicit gestures; that is, gestures like sharing posts with Google Reader, dropping links into Twitter that are interesting, and so on.

Rob’s response:

realy smart people make really complex things simple. Like Winer did with RSS.

My mind started turning with that comment. On one level, I was feeling like it was a bit of a snipe at Gillmor, but on another, it just didn’t sound right to me.

Can anyone reading this tell me with any degree of certainty that they fully understand the power of RSS? If we did, all those great things that we don’t have now but want would already be built. Examples: Disqus, the commenting system used here, rolled out an incredible update that actually creates community around the blog comments here. If you sign up for Disqus and comment under your Disqus name, you become part of this, and other Disqus-driven communities.

Then there’s FriendFeed, which I like to think of as my personal kitchen sink. Friendfeed takes everything I’ve posted here, to Pownce, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Zooomr, to my other social networks I’ve added and puts it in a stream. Then it adds the conversation around those items, so looking at my Friendfeed means seeing a picture of the social footprints of me, my friends, and my contacts around the web.

Both of these are driven by RSS. Without RSS attached to Twitter and other networks, there would be no foundation to build upon. RSS has been around for what? 10+ years? Yet, it’s taken this long for Twitter to evolve, and Disqus, and Friendfeed and many others and all pivot on RSS.

RSS is definitely a really simple thing, but it’s so complex I don’t think any of us fully understand its power. Maybe Dave Winer understands it, but I think even he doesn’t really envision all of the ways it might be used. Dave’s writing apps using RSS as the foundation for his FlickrFan application — a “this year” brainstorm.

Really simple, but not so simple. Really simple, but so powerful we haven’t figured it all out.

The same is true of gestures, both on and offline. I’m sure my kids view my zone-outs while they’re going on about something or another as a gesture of inattention. I’m sure my creditors understand my forgetting to pay their bill as a gesture of inattention, and I’m sure the volume of posts on the other blog compared to this one over the past month or two also gestures where my attention has been lately.

It seems simple enough, but it’s really much more complex and powerful than any of us understand. If you feel so inclined, you can find and follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed. I will consider that a gesture, too, and pay proper attention.

Final wisdom from a Hugh McLeod tweet:

“Twitter is a river you live beside. You don’t have to [...] catch every fish to live beside it.” http://tinyurl.com/2futq9

Technorati Tags: networks, RSS, simple, complex, social graph, social networks, social web, attention, gestures

Tuesday I had to register DG for high school. I spent two days putting together the materials — a six-page enrollment form, vaccination records, utility bill proving residence, copy of her birth certificate, then the horrible process of figuring out four years worth of class schedules, because at this school, it’s expected that your child’s career path will be known from birth so that they are properly tracked for all academics and electives in high school.

Good luck with that. We still haven’t finished.

I arrived at the school on Tuesday night, ‘packet of doom’* in hand. And I waited. And waited. You can even see the timeline of waiting on my Twitter timeline for Tuesday, because I was so bored, aggravated and tired of waiting that I twittered everyone’s ear off. After 2 hours or so, I finally got to hand in my packet. Yes, that’s all. I waited in line for 2 hours to hand in my packet. Then they sent me to another 2-hour line for the school nurse to sign off on the vaccination record. Patience exhausted, I bailed out of that line and told them I’d bring it back later in the week when things weren’t quite so crowded.

The whole time I stood in line, one question rolled around in my head until it was close to exploding.

“Why can’t these records simply be electronically transferred from her current school to the high school?”

I answered the same questions, provided the same birth certificate, showed the same vaccination record. These were all acceptable documents for her admission into elementary and middle school, so why did I have to reproduce them yet again for the high school?

It should have been as simple as reviewing the data on file, updating contact information if necessary, and signing a consent form to move my daughter’s data from one school to the next via electronic transfer. Or transferring it myself.

When she applies to colleges in four years, it should be as simple as instructing the school to transfer her transcript electronically to her colleges of choice along with SAT, AP, and ACT scores.

Portable Packets. Not just for school enrollment. Social networks. Medical records. Job applications. This was the topic of yesterday’s NewsGang Live — a great discussion with Steve Gillmor, Mary Hodder, Chris Saad, Robert Anderson and Matt Terenzio and me, though for this show I listened far more than I spoke.

It’s a fascinating discussion with lots of questions and intersections. If we own our data, do we control it? How do we control it? In the school discussion, I specifically added the “sign consent forms” phrase, because I believe that I own my daughter’s data as her parent, and I have the right to control what data is transferred to the high school. Should electronic data be injected with “reverse DRM” , built-in electronic consent to use that data but not own it? What about medical records, which we surely do not own at this point in time anyway. Our doctors and insurance companies have more rights to our medical records than we do, though I strongly disagree with that antique and idiotic philosophy.

Is there any reason to have to hunt down a little booklet with handwritten verification that vaccinations have been administered when it could be as simple as having a packet of stored electronic data which I can release to the school upon enrollment? It seems like a waste of money and time to have to produce the booklet so that it can be photocopied and attached to a paper file which someone then has to file by hand and pull out from the file drawer by hand to hand-file updates.

What came out of today’s discussion was much food for thought around how our little packets of doom can be moved around the Internet, in and out of different sites at our behest with our consent and without losing our control over the data or giving ownership to anyone else. Wholesale government internet-watching notwithstanding (see the FISA posts over on the other blog for more info), I want to be able to create a “packet” of information about me, my social networks, my vital information, etc. that I own and control — a packet that can be shared in part or whole by social networks, or schools, or health providers at my behest.

To me, this is the foundation of Web 3.0. Not the semantic web, not search, not cool widgets or Twitter clones. A way to create my own packet of personal data, which is portable across different aspects of my life and my web participation, where I control which data is given and how it’s used.

If you want a glimpse of the web of tomorrow, give the show a listen. There were some incredibly brilliant minds working together toward solutions.

* the term is a nod to QueenofSpain’s excellent description of her kindergarten enrollment packet

Technorati Tags: packets, portability, web 3.0, data, ownership, social networks, digital footprint

Evidently Scientologists have enough administrative access to EBay to delete listings that they view as patent infringements, such as the so-called e-meter. (Note, the listing was removed shortly after the screenshot was taken).

How can they do that?

If you’re uninitiated to eBay, you’d probably think that for each of these removals, the Church of Scientology informs eBay of the violation of its rights, eBay considers the merits of their argument, and then only then does eBay yank the listing. But that’s not what happens at all. Instead, eBay effectively deputizes Scientology, which logs into eBay and removes the listings itself.

The mechanism that permits the Church of Scientology (and others) such broad access and discretion is called the Verified Rights Owner (”VeRO“) Program. Membership in VeRO is obtained simply by submitting a form to eBay explaining that you are an Intellectual Property rights holder.

Here’s what you REALLY need to know: Your private information, including UserID, name, address, and phone number can be discovered through this program. From EBay’s VeRO terms:

How your personal information may be released. eBay will never give out your credit card information, except in rare cases when required by a court, or law enforcement agency. However, eBay’s Privacy Policy states, “we can (and you authorize us to) disclose your User ID, name, street address, city, state, zip code, country, phone number, email, and company name to eBay VeRO Program participants as we in our sole discretion believe necessary or appropriate in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringement, piracy, or other unlawful activity.”

Beware, especially if you bid on or plan to sell secondhand Scientology “e-Meters”. I can’t help wondering what the mechanism is to gain access to this information. It seems pretty indiscriminate, which concerns me. When all of the “violator discretion” is on the side of the one with access to one’s private information, it lends itself to abuse, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: Scientology, eBay, privacy, patent, copyright

H/T Slashdot

Scientology is More Dangerous Than You Think
Originally uploaded by zoomar

Liz’ post about the all-out war declared on Scientology by “Anonymous” highlights the weird position of those of us who oppose Scientology’s attack on mental illness. Is the enemy of our enemy our friend?

“Anonymous” has vowed to “expel [Scientology] from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.” In their “declaration” (Video here and text here) they describe themselves as “Legion, for we are many…” a reference to the utterance of the demon to Jesus in Mark 5:10 just before Jesus cast the demon out.

Many of us, myself included, would like to see Scientology debunked, muzzled and neutered when it comes to their destructive and iconoclastic ideas about mental illness, its origins, and its treatment. I really don’t care if people who become Scientologists spend tons of money working their way up the ladder, but when they take mentally ill people, stigmatize them, and elevate Tom Cruise to the title of prophet for the purpose of using his celebrity as a baseball bat to browbeat others into abandoning treatment for their conditions, they cross the line into my territory.

So you’d think that my first instinct was to cheer, right? Wrong. I have some serious difficulties with the methods this group is using to ‘take down’ Scientology. Hacking websites (and missing more than once), staging anonymous protests (thank you Zoomar, for providing the photo of yesterday’s Seattle protest), and claiming chaos as their mantra does nothing to encourage me to consider them an ally. From their own description:

An anonymous collective, left to its own devices, quickly builds its own society out of rage and hate. Anonymous is not so much unlike other web communities, we have in-jokes, culture, extended debates, etc, just like everyone else. The difference, and the reason we visit other communities is that we have a need to be harassed by “nannying” moderators. Here, there isn’t anyone to do that - yet long and productive edit wars spring up at about the rate you’d never tolerate elsewhere, on topics you’d never believe. We have no leader, no pretentious douchebag or group thereof to set in stone what Anonymous is and is not about. We don’t dare to lead.

Our society holds a million spiteful things. Come and see.

And in one of the most monumental contradictions ever, they say this:

We don’t bury our feelings or hide behind passive-aggressive platitudes; if we don’t like you we say it to your face. This is the Internet, grow some fucking skin.

Let me see if I have this right. There’s nothing passive-aggressive about blasting organizations hacking websites, and harassing people under the guise of “anonymous”? They answer that question this way:

In a world were [sic] martial law, individual repression and persecution, and violations to rights granted by the constitution are legally trampled by the government, the only way to truly protest without being chastised is to remain anonymous.

Or rephrased, we wish to misbehave for a higher purpose.  Okaaaay. As to their war on Scientology, they say this:

‘Anons’ claim that the church of Scientology is an organization that seeks totalitarian control over people. They claim that Tom Cruise’s actions against Psychiatrists prove that they don’t want to make things better, that they have their own agenda. Anonymous say that Scientology’s repeated attacks on several internet pages since 1995 demonstrate that they want to control information for their own purposes in order to subdue masses to take their money.

The goal is admirable; the method, not so much. Reading their manifestos and statements leaves me feeling like I’ve read the back pages of an angry teenager’s diary.

Ironically, if Anonymous had a name, a purpose and a manifesto borne out of intellectual honesty, they’d likely persuade me to participate, or at least support them via blog posts or other means, but as it stands now, the enemy of my enemy just can’t be my friend.

Technorati Tags: Anonymous, cult, war, Tom Cruise, Scientology, society, religion