Author: JP

Finding the sea of green: More on Twitter is My Submarine

In the town where I was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea,
And he told us of his life,
In the land of submarines,

So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine,

We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine,
We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine.

And our friends are all aboard,
Many more of them live next door,
And the band begins to play.

Yellow Submarine (Lennon/McCartney) The Beatles, 1966

Yesterday I spent some time talking about how I viewed Twitter now, having used it for a while. Today I thought I’d follow up with a brief explanation on how Twitter is my Submarine changes the way I treat Twitter.

As my last post details,  I view Twitterland as my personal ocean, and Twitter itself as my personal submarine and periscope. Once I understood this, it wasn’t long before I understood a few things:

1. In Twitterland, I am in control of the pollution that enters my personal ocean. I choose the tributaries that make the rivers of information that go into my own ocean. I can turn the tributaries on and off. That made me think of what I would consider polluting habits. Twitterland has many Polluting Habits.

My first change of behaviour, therefore, was to start looking at everything I did in Twitter from the viewpoint of pollution of personal oceans, I wanted to identify the polluting habits.

2. The first one is Industrial Pollution, where my personal ocean gets filled up with other people’s automated tweets, the expulsion of particulate contaminants into my personal water. You know something? I like automated tweets, the way they take human latency out of the process, the way they tend to come error free and context rich. But you know something else? I want to choose whose automated tweets I get; more importantly, I want to choose which particular themes the automated tweets are about. Today I get one person saying “I am here.” “Now I am here.” “Now I have moved and I am here”. A second person is signalling “I’m live, come talk to me” as if they’re some seedy chat line. A third is into “I’m playing this piece of music now”. And this one. And this one. The issue is not the content as much as the frequency of publishing. One day I will have the tools to say “Please turn off tweeter A’s music tweets, tweeter B’s food tweets, tweeter C’s location signalling; they’re all very nice people, they’re my friends, but the reason they’re my friends is that we aren’t alike in all our tastes!”. But until that day arrives, I need to let my friends know that a little tweet sensitivity will go a long way towards helping keep many of our personal oceans clean.

My second change of behaviour was to choose to avoid all automated tweets; instead, I signalled my movement to a higher-tweet-frequency place such as blip.fm or last.fm, and then tweeted the odd sample or two, not the whole session.

3. The next source of pollution was the introduction of Waste Products into my personal ocean. This was where people I followed kept up high levels of shameless self-plugging and personal advertising, making my ocean uncecessarily bigger. I said Hey (Hey) You (You) Get off of My Ocean.

My response was to unfollow the people, in the hope that anything useful they said would be retweeted by someone else. Waste Producers tend to have large numbers of followers, so it’s not difficult to find someone who will filter their waste for you.

4. The final source of pollution was people who Shone Light into My Darkroom. Shining lights is a Good Thing. Except in darkrooms, especially when you’re a photographer. I found that Twitter was not just a place I went to in order to find things out, it was also a place I went to in the hope that there were things I would *not* find out. I expected people who understood about “spoiling” and how to avoid it.

My response was to be very careful about spoilers, to make sure I was considerate to others when tweeting.

And you know something? That about sums it up. Twitter is a collaborative space, where many personal oceans overlap. We have to learn to be considerate to each other in that collaborative space.

There’s another big subject I want to write about, the role of Twitter in Knowledge Management, but that’s not for today. I’m done for today. Views and comments welcome as usual.

[Incidentally, I have not been able to find the person who took the wonderful photograph above, I found it on the web without any accreditation for me to use and thank….help please].

Thinking about Twitter: a submarine in the ocean of the Web

I like Twitter, particularly because of its publish-subscribe nature. A few weeks ago, I described Twitter as:

a newspaper. a bulletin board. a club. an “adda”. a telephone network.

Twitter is all these things. It brings me the news. It is a place where people publish notices. It’s a place where I meet my friends, and where we talk to each other. It is many things to many people. But. And it is a humdinger of a but. It’s a lot more than that.

To me, Twitter is fast becoming my personal submarine and periscope to the ocean of the World Wide Web, the personal areas I want to go to defined by my relationships to people and ideas. It doesn’t mean that I don’t use the rest of the web:  Twitter is an adjunct to the web, a very important adjunct, but an adjunct nevertheless. The way I use Twitter teaches me something, something about the way things may be going. Let me explain what I mean.

  1. Twitter is my feed aggregator. One of the ways I interact with the web is through RSS, and over the years I’ve tried to find better and better ways to filter the firehose. Inspecting blogrolls. Shared OPMLs. You name it. I’ve used a number of different aggregators, now I use Twitter as a pseudo-aggregator.
  2. Twitter is my attention enhancer. One of the ways I interact with the web is through collaborative filtering and voting, some way of getting the right stories to the surface, stories from people I don’t know, stories about people I don’t know. Again, over the years, I’ve tried to find better and better ways to let other people filter the firehose for me, using tools ranging from StumbleUpon to Digg and a whole lot in between. Now I use Twitter to surface the stories that matter, particularly with the growth of retweeting.
  3. Twitter is my bookmarking service. One of the ways I interact with the web is through the use of bookmarking services, some way of identifying stories I want to get back to later. The use of tags has helped in this regard, particularly when combined with search engines. The ability to save bookmarks at browser level has also helped, but caused its own problems for a while, when the bookmarks used to be locked into the specific machine. Now those problems have been solved with bookmarking services, but I find I’ve tended more and more to discover the stories via Twitter. So now I “favourite” the tweet instead.
  4. Twitter is my emergent searchable web and engine. One of the ways I interact with the web is through the use of search engines, particularly Google. So to some extent I am reliant on how sites and pages are tagged, spidered, indexed. But now something else is happening. Instead of metatags embedded in sites, I have tweets. 140 characters of description written by someone, 140 characters of freeform searchable text available via Twitter Search (I still think of it as Summize, I’m old that way). So when I look for something, one of the places I go to first is Twitter Search.

There are also many things Twitter is not, and these are also important to note.

Ads: I enjoy the fact that it is ad-free; the way I look at it, if it becomes ad-full then someone else will build something that is ad-free. Because one of the reasons I like Twitter is its ad-free-ness. It’s important to me. And I would probably stop using it overnight if that changed.

E-commerce: Twitter is not where I go to in order to buy and sell things. I have the whole of the web for that. Twitter is a personalised place, a private place, a segment of the web where I am in conversation with my friends. No place for multi-level-marketing, no place for people to Makoff with my money (assuming, of course, that the past tense of Makoff is Madoff).

Stories: the Web is the library where my stories are located, stories cast in video and audio and text. Twitter is the catalogue for my personal interests, defined in two ways: my personal profiles and preferences, along with the ambient influences of my friends and associates. I was particularly taken with the description of Twitter in Clay Spinuzzi’s blog recently, where he spoke about Twitter as a means of assessing ambient status. I had the opportunity of meeting Clay in Austin over the summer (we take our summer vacation every year in Austin, I love that city); he is a very clever man with some real insights into the way human networks work.

Twitter is not a replacement for the web, nor will it ever be. Its publish-subscribe nature helps us have capillary conversations, (aso written about here and here) and this is very important. The tweet, the @friend message and the DM replicate human conversation more realistically than many prior forms of communication, that and the pub-sub nature gives its capillarity. The ability to compress context via snurls and bit.lys and tinyurls is not intrinsically part of Twitter, but I see it more used in Twitter than anywhere else. The asymmetric follow helps us improve our capacity to sense ambient status, which also helps us in many ways.

When you come down to it, a social network offers you six things.

  • A directory of people, a subset of which you know.
  • Some way of grouping or classifying those people in overlapping subsets of group or network or interest or whatever.
  • A way of communicating with those people, two-way, multi-way, broadcast.
  • A way of scheduling events where you meet those people.
  • A way of sharing status across a whole slew of things.
  • A way of keeping track of changes to all those things.

Early telephones came with directories, gave you opportunities to group and classify, let you communicate. Event scheduling and ambient status sharing were absent, as was the ability to share information about change.

The ability to connect directories with scheduling became available in early office productivity environments like PROFS or CEO, and reached critical mass with Microsoft Office, Outlook and Exchange.

Ambient status sharing became possible when “chat” and IM became popular, and Bloomberg, ostensibly accidentally, saw the value of connecting communities with chat facilities.

We had to wait till Facebook came along before someone saw the value of alerting the community to changes in each of these areas: joining or leaving the directory; forming or re-forming relationships and groupings; adding or subtracting ways of communicating; signalling attendance or non-attendance at events and meetings; sharing status. So the News Feed came along.

Twitter is a news feed, but with a difference. With many differences. Which is why I think of it as a submarine with a periscope.

And I think one of the most important things about Twitter is its size. There are 140 good reasons to like Twitter. Which makes it a submarine, fast, fleet, agile.

of mangoes and moustaches and design

I love mangoes. So much so that I eat them in every possible form: the normal fruit, the dried fruit, the pickle, the juice, ice cream, sorbet, whatever. Even in joke form. Mangoes in to a bar.

Talking about mangoes and bars, take a look at this:

What a wonderful idea. A fork with an extra-long central tine, so that you can “spear” the mango all the way to the seed, so that you can peel off the skin and eat the mango lollipop style. Mango forks have been around for quite some time, as you can see below:


If you want to know more about mango forks, you need to read Maura Graber’s forthcoming book, Let Them Eat Cake.

While I was wandering around her site, I was reminded of another piece of wonderful Victorian utensil invention, the moustache spoon. So here’s one:

Don’t you just love it when people design useful things?

Musing about lifestreaming and learning

I saw this today:

The Feltron Report. Nick Felton’s report on his activities during 2008.

Absolutely fascinating. As the cost of such data acquisition drops, and as the cost of storing such data drops as well, the possibilities are tremendous.

From an enterprise perspective, what the report represents is a part of the future of two things: CVs and appraisals. Nick’s work reminds us that you can now tell a story about what you did in ways you could never have done before. As with anything else, there are opportunities to game the “system”, but that is not what I want to concentrate on. I want to look at the positive benefits of having such facilities, my world is littered with half-full glasses and half-open doors.

Why am I excited about this?

Firstly, because of the importance of feedback loops. Because feedback loops of this sort are valuable as learning tools. As I learn more about what I really did with my time, I learn more about what I would like to change in that context; the feedback loop of “actuals” helps me do that. As I learn more about what I liked and what I disliked, I learn more about how I can keep doing the things I like doing; collaborative filtering helps me do that. As I learn more about what others perceive as things I did well and did badly, I learn more about how I can improve my strengths as well as my weaknesses; the feedback loop of “reviews” helps me do that.

Secondly, because of the value of “independent” low-cost data collection in this context. Writing down every song I listen to, and writing down all the time I spend listening to music, is painful. But rating songs as I listen to them, and having something like last.fm do the aggregation of my listenstream, it takes that pain away. Now if activities at work could be aggregated in this way, people would think differently about time sheets. Today too much of what goes into a time sheet is a lie.

Thirdly, because of the ability to share the information so gained. In the past, whether it was a CV or a “performance review” or an “appraisal”, what went into the report was very subjective, very biased. As a result people didn’t like sharing the information with others. When the data is collected independently and objectively, this unwillingness to share goes away.

Finally, because of the value we can unlock in teaching. Take the enterprise context of “induction”. You know what I mean, that strange process when you try and explain what you do to someone completely new. When you can give someone a “Felton Report” for a particular role, there is so much rich information there. The report could be an exemplar’s actual report, it could be a synthetic report made up of a number of exemplars averaged out.

We can learn so much. About differences in locations and geographies and cultures.

I’ve kept my comments to the enterprise context, but actually they apply everywhere. Everywhere where people want to learn. Felton Reports will become valuable in the context of education everywhere.

Which is why I am not surprised that I learnt about their existence from glassbeed. [You’re a good man, Clarence Fisher.] I follow Clarence Fisher because he’s that rare breed, a teacher who really means to make use of modern technology in the classroom to the benefit of the people he teaches.

wondering about spam

I use Akismet, and as a result most of the spam directed towards my blog gets trapped. Some stuff does get through, and there’s something about the stuff that gets through that intrigues me. So I thought I’d share it and find out if anyone can shed light on the phenomenon.

A large percentage of the spam that does get through seems to be directed at a particular post, as shown below:

It’s an old post, nearly three years old. And it doesn’t read too well, the quotation marks have been replaced by hieroglyphics ever since I recovered the post from backup. But I can’t see anything unusual or different about the post, something strange that would attract spam. Yet maybe 70 per cent of the spam that makes it past Akismet is directed towards this post. Anyone know why? Anyone experience anything similar?