Field notes off the web

In St. Louis, Henry Goldkamp spends his weekends on the streets writing poetry for passersby, using a Smith-Corona manual typewriter.

I find this really cool, if only for the very concept, and so did St. Louis's Riverfront Times.

Goldkamp has gone one step further, though, and installed about 40 typewriters, with paper, at various places around the city, inviting St. Louisans to answer the question "What the hell is St. Louis thinking?"

Now, I have to admit, something in the back of my tech-saturated head was thinking "Hey, that would make a cool project, put a bunch of keyboards around the city, pipe the results back to a server somewhere and show them on a web page in real time ..."

Um, no.  We already have that, more or less.  It's called Twitter.

What Goldkamp is doing is getting people to interact with technology that, to many of them, comes from another age, almost as though from another planet.  "How do I work this thing?" seems to be a common response.  Having learned to type on some combination of IBM Selectric, Smith-Corona and my grandfather's manual Underwood (I loved that thing), I have to chuckle a bit, but by the same token I can understand why it might be daunting at first.

Besides having to fuss with paper and the carriage return, and mash on the keys to get the typebars to move, the most distinctive feature of a typewriter as opposed to a computer keyboard is that you can't delete anything.  There's a backspace key, but that just moves the paper one space to the right.  About the best you can do is type Xs over what you already typed (on the other hand, you can have fun combining letters to make little icons).  If you were writing professionally, you'd generally type double-spaced (i.e., with a blank line after each line of words), mark up the results with a pencil, literally cut and paste to rearrange, and then retype the whole thing for the next draft.

So if you're sitting at one of Goldkamp's typewriters, expressing your thoughts, you're making a record of every typo and every false start,  all in the order it came out, on a nice, tangible piece of paper that you produced yourself.  At least at first, it will be the only copy of those words in the world, and if someone wants to read it, they'll have to come see it.

Pretty much the antithesis of publishing on the web, and pretty much the way things were for around a hundred years until the "Personal Computer" came along.


Goldkamp is by no means a technophobe.  Among other things, he runs the web site freshpoetrystl.org,  where you can see "A selection of poems that turned out okay", such a typically Midwestern way of putting it, and one of the best page titles I've ever seen.   For my money, the poems I looked at did come out okay, if not better.

One more Twittery data point

The LA Times is clearly comfortable with Twitter, or at least its online version is.  A recent article on the Boeing 787 (aka Dreamliner) seems to consist mostly of tweets.  We see tweets from stranded travelers and tweets from not-stranded travelers commenting on their predicament.  Most significantly, I think, is that Boeing's official reaction is given in the form of tweets.

This seems to be more the exception than the rule, judging by a few other LA Times articles I clicked through to.

Fitting Twitter into the bigger picture

I've just re-read the nineteen previous posts labelled Twitter on this blog and I think I've sufficiently hammered on two main points:

• There's no more reason to believe a "Twitter and new media will supplant traditional news media" narrative than in so many other "Everything is Different Now" cases that have come along.
• Twitter is not particularly self-correcting and there's no clear way to sort fact from fantasy beyond good old-fashioned skepticism -- or referring back to other sources.

So once we dismiss the usual strawmen, where does that leave us?  What is the real relationship between Twitter and traditional media (which themselves have adapted significantly to the web)?  The easy answer is "it's complicated", which seems true as far as it goes but really doesn't say much.  So how about a few random data points?

Item: Tweeting is now a standard part of the celebrity publicity machine.  In turn, gossip magazines and sites routinely report on celebrity's tweets.  It would be interesting to know to what extent celebrities and their publicists are tweeting directly to fans and to what extent they're tweeting to magazine/web site editors.

Item: In the recent scandal leading to the resignation of George Entwistle the head of the BBC, one of the more devastating points of John Humphrys' interview of the soon-to-be-outgoing head was Entwistle's admission that he was unaware of a highly relevant tweet about an upcoming BBC Newsnight documentary (that, and his also having been unaware of the documentary itself).  Humphrys goes on to assert that even if Entwistle hadn't been personally following Twitter, someone on his staff should have been.

With further prompting from Humphrys, Entwistle then goes on to admit he also missed the front-page story in the Guardian denouncing the Newsnight piece, leaving one to wonder what, if anything, Entwistle was aware of.  Nonetheless the presumption, coming from a well-respected traditional journalist in a rather high-stakes context, was that Twitter was something that the head of the BBC, and journalists in general, should pay serious attention to.  (Lest this post present too one-sided a view of Entwistle, here's a transcript of the interview -- the Torygraph uses a less annoying format than the Grauniad article I complained about.)

Item:  Swirling in the same cloud of scandal, was the shockingly prolific criminal behavior of a recently deceased well-known television personality.  The resulting public outrage included, as one would expect by now, a major Twitter storm.

Item: Twitter continues to be an important means of smuggling information out of repressive states.  I'm glad to say that Google's Speak2Tweet service has played a role in helping bypass state internet crackdowns, most recently in Syria (I have nothing personally to do with providing this service, and I don't know anything about it that you don't, but I'm happy to be associated with it indirectly as a Googler).  On the other hand, a fair bit of mis- and dis- information makes its way into the unfiltered feed.  Considering the stakes, it seems wise to be more cautious than usual in judging the reliability of tweets, to say nothing of acting on them.

Item: A recent Twitter spat between an American economist and the president of Estonia is being made into an opera.  The opera will premiere in Tallinn, to be performed by an Estonian mezzo-soprano, so one can imagine that the Estonian side might come off rather better.

For the most part, Twitter seems more like a parallel channel to the traditional media, rather than something likely to supplant them.  In all but one case, Twitter looks like one more tool in the box.  Publicists have always promoted their clients by any means available, the public has always complained by whatever means is at hand, dissidents have always found ways to get their story out, and pop-culture oriented artists have always grabbed on to whatever was floating by.  To the extent that it's harder for regimes to prevent suppressed information from leaking out, credit should go mostly to the internet and web as a whole, acknowledging that Twitter has been particularly effective.

The second item is more intriguing.  In this case, Twitter looks more like something new intruding in the traditional media game.  Imagine radio journalists in the mid twentieth century realizing that they needed to pay attention to this wild and wooly new "television" thing, and print journalists some time before that realizing that there really was something to these new "radio" devices or, for that matter, the current interplay between traditional outlets and blogs.

The key here is not the technology, but who's involved and how.  In the first item, Twitter is effectively acting as a new medium in the traditional publicity structure.  Likewise, in the last three items, the people, or the artists, are making use of Twitter as they would any other medium.  In the second item, the whole point is that Entwistle should have been treating Twitter as another medium for gathering information (or perhaps he did, by ignoring it).  The implication, really, is that treating Twitter as another medium among many is the normal thing to do, and by not doing so, Entwistle showed himself to be woefully out of touch.

More stuff to be uneasy about

Previously I mentioned a couple of attempts to mine the Twitterverse for signs of what's going on in the world.  It's also perfectly possible to mine the conventional media.  One such effort is globalincedentreport.com, a "global display of terrorism and other suspicious events". [The link is now broken. I'm not going to chase down when the site shut down, but I don't remember ever running across a reference to it after stumbling on it for this post -- D.H. July 2025]

Global Incident Report gathers together news stories and plots their locations on a global map using eye-catchingly garish icons.  There are several categories of incident, such as disease outbreaks, gang-related activity, drug interdictions and terrorist threats (you'll need to establish an account to view those and a couple of other categories, which seems reasonable).  Basically everything that makes your local TV news the angst-fest it is, right there in one handy web site.

Comparing this to Twitter, I'd say the geo-tagging is more accurate (though the site seems to think Miami, OK is on the Kansas-Missouri state line) and of course the information is more reliable.  Sorry, Web 2.0 fans, but I've been up and down this one.  Mainstream media have their own problems, but I'll take "rush-job vetting and curation aimed at selling ads" over no vetting and curation at all.

There's a clear sampling bias.  Since the reports are all in English, incidents tend to cluster in the US, UK and India.  Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the Commonwealth are sparser, but they're also generally less populated.  Beyond the bias toward English, it's not clear which feeds the site samples, which it self will be a subset of which feeds are made available.  So, definitely, caveat lector.

Even with the caveats, it's an interesting effort.  The mapped incidents link directly to primary sources -- transparency is good -- and the global view lets you get the big picture of what's going on.  Or at least what's being reported.  And tracked by the site ... anyway, still interesting.

More ESRI and Twitter

A while ago I posted about a map from esri.com that incorporated social media such as Twitter with more traditional sources of fire information.  My conclusion was that the social data was not that helpful.

ESRI has just put out another set of maps, this time on acceptance same-sex marriage.  The first map uses a proprietary demographic model to try to rate how likely a given county is to favor same-sex marriage.  As far as I can tell, this model isn't particularly based on, say, polling data or election results from ballot measures, but more on factors like how urban or rural the county is, how many people have gone to college and so forth.

The second map shows state laws.  It corresponds roughly with the first map.  With the interesting exception of Iowa, the first map shows significant support where same-sex marriage is legal, as one would expect.

The third map is based on Twitter data.  It says there is strong support for same-sex marriage across the country, opposition in five states (including Minnesota, despite significant support in the populous Twin Cities), and very strong opposition in exactly one state: North Carolina.  Idaho, Wyoming and Vermont had insufficient data.

The support map shows North Carolina as fairly similar to neighboring Virginia, which the Twitter data shows as strongly supportive, and as more supportive than neighboring South Carolina and Tennessee. The Twitter data show both of those states as moderately supportive.

Clearly something is out of line here.  Two possible explanations:

• Concerning the overall map, the Twitterverse is not a representative sample.  Overall, Twitter traffic is much more supportive of same-sex marriage than the country as a whole.  This probably shouldn't come as a surprise.
• Concerning North Carolina, the Twitter data covers May 9 through June 30, 2012.  As the map explanation notes, North Carolina had voted on May 8 against a proposition supporting same-sex marriage, by a roughly 60-40 margin after a very intense campaign.  It would be interesting to know what portion of the Twitter traffic surveyed is from the immediate aftermath of that election.  My guess would be a large portion.

Along with the fire map I mentioned above and a study on Twitter rumors after the London riots, which was presented in the Guardian as confirming the notion that Twitter is a good, self-correcting source of information but in fact shows anything but, this is the third piece of evidence I've run across suggesting that you should treat any inferences drawn from Twitter traffic with a grain of salt.

Twitter may well be a great way to find out what people, at least those with Twitter accounts, are paying attention to at the moment, but it's risky, to say the least, to draw conclusions about objective facts from that.

Where's the fire?

It's been a busy fire season in the Southwest, with hot, dry weather and an abundance of fuel.  While I'm generally skeptical about the world-changing potential of social media (ultimately, of the idea that a new technology is necessarily likely to have a great impact), that doesn't mean social media can't play a role.

One example is this fire map from esri (makers of geographic information systems (GIS) software).  Along with official data such as wind information from NOAA and fire perimeters from USGS, it includes layers for Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube activity.  The YouTube feature for some reason got stuck on the same video until I reloaded the page, at which point it worked fine.

The Twitter layer seems to be tagged by the location of the person tweeting.  For example, someone in Fort Collins tweeting a Denver Post story about the Waldo Canyon fire over a hundred miles away is shown in Fort Collins, not where the fire is.  To be fair, it's a lot easier to locate the person tweeting than to figure out from the contents of the tweet that it's really about something somewhere else.

All in all, esri's map seems useful to me mostly for the official information.  The social layer is interesting, but by no means essential.  Searching for "Colorado fire" on Twitter search turns up many more tweets, at least as relevant as those from the map.  Likewise for a YouTube search.  Neither of these searches directly maps the location of the footage, but this doesn't seem like a great obstacle.  Wildfires are quickly given distinctive names ("High Park fire", "Waldo Canyon fire") and you can easily search on those.

And of course wildfires would quickly be given distinctive names.  People need to tell them apart.  If I live in Colorado Springs, I don't care much about the High Park fire, but I care a lot about the Waldo Canyon fire.  As a side effect, it's easy to search for information about a given fire without consulting a map.

And what does such a search find?  Among other things, quite a few links to, and videos from, local newspapers and TV stations.

In short, what does a social-media-enhanced map and search space look like?  A fair bit like one without social media, at least in the context of events with wide interest where there are well-developed traditional media sources.

But broadcasting was never really supposed to be the strong point of social media anyway.

Is it OK to tweet "fire" in a crowded theater?

Evidently not.

Or at least, it's not a good idea to tweet in jest that you'll blow an airport sky-high if it remains closed for snow, so preventing you from visiting your girlfriend.  Paul Chambers of Doncaster, England found this out the hard way, paying a fine of £1000, gaining a criminal record and losing his job in the bargain.  His appeal will be heard before the high court of the UK and his defense has had at least one high-profile fundraiser, but it's all a bit sobering, to say the least.

This lack of humo(u)r on the part of airport security is not new, by the way, nor limited to the UK.  I remember as a kid -- so, ahem, well before 9/11 -- noticing a sign at the airport we were flying out of saying it was a federal crime even to joke about hijacking, bombs and such, and promptly blanching and making a mental note not to make any smart comments to the nice folks by the metal detector.

With that in mind, the remarkable aspect of the case isn't so much that it involves Twitter, though it is one of the first such cases, but that the authorities chose to prosecute for this particular remark at all.  I don't know how often such cases are prosecuted, but I'd guess it's not too often.  They certainly don't seem to make the press much.  I doubt the story would have been less remarkable had Mr. Chambers been brought in for making the same remark in person at the ticket counter.

In any case, caveat tweetor.

[Paul Chambers' conviction was eventually quashed, two and a half years later on the third appeal, the case having attracted considerable attention and celebrity involvement.  It's not clear if his job was reinstated, but according to Wikipedia he and his girlfriend did eventually marry.]

Rumours and tweets of rumours

Someone at the Guardian (aided by academics at several universities) put in a bunch of overtime analyzing the Twitter traffic from last summer's riots in England.  In all, they traced seven rumors, five that turned out to be false, one that turned out to be true, and one they classify as "unsubstantiated."  They then put together a nice interactive graphic of the results, including a graph of the volume of traffic over time and a sort of cloud diagram color coded to show support for, opposition to, questioning of and commentary on the rumor in question, with size indicating the "influence" of the tweet, based on number of followers the originator of the tweet had.

The results are fascinating.  You should probably have a look at them yourself (here's the link again) before going on.


There is a fairly widespread notion that the web corrects itself.  People may put up misinformation, whether deliberately or in good faith, but eventually the real story will come out and supplant it.  The lead-in to the Guardian interactive graphic says so in as many words: "... Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation ..."

I don't see a lot of support for this in the data presented.

In the self-correcting model, you would expect to see an initial wave of green for a false rumor, coming with the original misinformation, steadily replaced by red, with possibly some yellow (questioning) and gray (commentary) in between.  Following is what actually happened for the five rumors determined to be definitely false.

• Rioters attack London Zoo and release animals:  Initially, green traffic grows.  After a while, red traffic comes in denying the rumor.  Hours later, there is influential red traffic, but the green traffic is still about as influential.  Traffic then dwindles, with the last bits being green, still supporting the rumor hours after it has been disputed.
• Rioters cook their own food in McDonalds: This one was picked up early by the website of the Daily Mail, which stated that there had been reports of this happening.  In any case, the green traffic surges moderately twice, before peaking at high volume several hours later.  There is no red traffic to speak of.
• London Eye set on fire:  This one actually does follow the predicted pattern.  The initial green is quickly joined by yellow and red.  The proportion of red steadily grows, and as traffic dies down it is almost entirely red.
• Rioters attack a children's hospital in Birmingham:  In this case one source of denials was someone actually working at the hospital.  Again, a strong surge of green is gradually taken over by red, but not completely.  As traffic dies down, the rumor is still being circulated as true.  Late in the game, it resurges again, though again there is a countersurge of denial.
• Army deployed in Bank [I believe this refers to the area in London near the Bank of England and the Bank tube station]:  Traffic starts out yellow, as a question over a photo (which was actually a photo of tanks in Egypt).  Red traffic begins to grow, but so does green, and yellow continues to dominate.  Eventually everything dies down.  The last bits of traffic are yellow

In summary: One of the five cases follows the "good information drives out bad" model.  One other more or less follows it.  Two are an inconclusive mix of support and denial.  One consists almost entirely of support for a false rumor.

This was in one of the world's most connected cities, with widespread access to the internet, cell phones, land lines, television, newspapers, live webcams and whatever else.  Only in the case where the rumor was trivial to refute (for example via this webcam) did Twitter appear to self-correct. 

One would be hard-pressed, I think, to distinguish between the actual true rumor (Miss Selfridge set on fire -- that's the name of a store, not a person) and the false rumor about McDonalds based solely on the volume and influence of tweets confirming and denying.  Likewise, the unsubstantiated rumor (Police 'beat 16-year-old girl') follows its own pattern, mostly surges of green, but interspersed with yellow.

This may seem like a lot of argumentation just to say "Take your tweets with a grain of salt", but pretty much everything tastes better with data.

Messin' with the buttons again

It took a couple of tries, because the template I use is a fairly old one, but I've made a couple of tweaks to the buttons at the bottom of posts

• The old hand-crafted Digg widget is gone.  So far as I'm aware, no one has ever Dugg this blog.
• The old email button is gone
• In its place is an all-singing all-dancing set of share buttons, comprising (as I write this)
• email
• share to Blogger
• share to Twitter
• share to Facebook
• share to Google Buzz
• +1 -- a quick way to say "I like this", should you ever be so inclined

and of course, if you just want to read the post and be done with it, you still can do that, too.

@papabear this is @babybear. What's your 20?

I was listening to a piece on All Tech Considered about the hackathon Random Hacks of Kindness and was  duly impressed, not only by the presenter's brave effort to rescue the original meaning of "hack" from the dustbin, but of course by the whole idea of hacking together apps to make it easier to save lives and otherwise make the world a better place.  Well done, all.

One of the hacks was an app that would use Twitter traffic during disasters to help pinpoint where aid workers were needed most or could generally do the most good.  Again, very cool stuff.  Then it hit me: Twitter is the new citizen's band.  Think about it.  A populist medium allowing people to converse with strangers and broadcast to (a portion of) the world at large.  Users of the medium go by handles.  Traffic is subdivided into channels.  And, what led me to the conclusion in the first place, the traffic itself is a fascinating combination of pure drivel and vital information (with a fair bit in between).

Not that CB itself has gone away.  Not only is the technology still in use, evidently so is most of the slang I recall from the 70s or so.

NEW TECHNOLOGY LOOKS ODDLY FAMILIAR STOP

My phone is not particularly well suited to texting, but for various reasons I've found myself doing more of it lately.  Even beyond the basic problem of typing on a chiclet keyboard with fingers that did some of their first typing on an Underwood manual, there are a couple of challenges.

For one, I'm used to writing complete sentences, so I find myself compulsively and pointlessly going back and fixing spelling mistakes, checking punctuation and so forth.  Mind, I don't have anything against the usual abbreviations and casual spellings. I doubt it's a sign that the language has gone to pot or that Kids These Days don't learn anything.  More likely it's a sign that full and careful spelling is just not worth the effort if you can get your message across more quickly without it.

The upshot is that I text much, much more slowly than I write.  I'd guess at least four times as slowly and very likely closer to eight or ten [re-reading in 2015, I note that I'm able to text much faster now, with a smartphone and keyboard app, and the character limit is much less visible.  I think my texting is somewhat less terse now, but the overall point of texting technology influencing texting style still stands, I think -- D.H.].  An order of magnitude in quantity generally means a change in quality and this is no different.  Working at such a slow speed, I find every word counts, as typing another is just too much bother.

Side note: Once I was at a conference where computer graphics legend Jim Blinn presented his first ray-traced picture.  Ray-tracing is a technique that carefully follows rays of light through every pixel of the picture, as opposed to the classic "polygon pushing" technique, which Blinn helped pioneer and which is still in wide use today because of its speed.  Polygon pushing determines which surfaces are visible and draws them (more or less directly), saving a bunch of time.  Blinn claimed that one of the nice aspects of ray-tracing was that since it was so slow, around eight hours per frame in that case, as I recall, you had plenty of time to think about what was going to be in the image.

Just so, slowing down to text gives much more time to think about a short message.  I'm sure the situation is different for experienced texters, but even then another factor comes into play: SMS's draconianly (and more or less artificially) short message length.  If you're tweeting, it doesn't matter if you're sitting at your desk typing full steam ahead, or picking out words while squinting at a cell phone, or rattling away with thumbs of lightning.  140 bytes is 140 bytes.

Way back in the early days of electronic communication networks, people sending messages faced a similar problem.  I'm not aware of any particular length restriction on telegraph messages, but for decades telegraph messages had to be transmitted, by hand, in morse code.  As a result every word was expensive -- and punctuation was conveyed in words, notably STOP for a period.  To cope with this, customers developed a concise "telegraphic" style in order to make every word count.

Technology doesn't just enable.  It also constrains, and the effects of such constraint can be just as interesting.

The contours of Twitter

Strange Maps is a fascinating blog of, well, unusual maps, generally accompanied by interesting analysis of what they might tell us about ourselves. The example that led me to the site was a map of Twitter traffic in London.

I'm a bit surprised that more than one commenter is skeptical of the data on the grounds that financial centers like the City show less traffic than areas like Soho. Wikipedia describes Soho as "predominantly a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices" (which sounds about right) while the City I recall (from a decade or so back) rolled up the sidewalks around dusk as the white-collar crowd headed out to go homeward or pubward to relax.

Hmm ... is one more likely to tweet from the offices of some bank or trading house with the boss nearby, or while relaxing at an "upscale restaurant" afterwards -- or for that matter working at a "media office" during the day? Likewise for the case of Wall Street vs. New York's SoHo and La Defense vs. Levallois in Paris, particularly as Levallois is (Wikipedia again) "one of the most densely populated municipalities in Europe".

I'm more curious what the map would look like normalized for population, that is, tweets per person in a given area as opposed to raw tweets. Are there more tweets in central London than in the surrounding suburbs because there are more people? Also interesting would be a breakdown of both raw and normalized volume by time of day. The raw volume would at least to some degree track the flow of people in and out of the city, while the normalized volume would be affected both by that and by people's daily habits.

[Happily, Strange Maps is still in business, and still keepin' it strange --D.H. Dec 2015]

The internet ate my brain. I think.

The Economist has a quick review of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. The gist is that the constant context-switching involved in web surfing is "already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence."

That "already" -- the reviewer's term and not necessarily Carr's -- is a telling bit of boiler plate, adding a bit of urgency in suggesting that this is the beginning of a long-term trend that will surely rot our brains completely before we know it.

Knee-jerk skepticism:

• Just how much do we know actually about "the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence", or "true intelligence" for that matter?
• Suppose we can show that, when web surfing, our brains behave in some sort of inattentive, scattered mode. Does that mean that we've lost the ability to think in any other mode, or just that that's how we think when we're surfing?
• If the web is rotting our brains by changing our patterns of thought, is there a corresponding change in, say, the rate of technical innovation (by some reasonably objective measure)?
• More subjectively, the has there been a change in the culture? My understanding is that contemporary culture is vapid, cheap and degraded and that things were much better in our parents' day. If so, that represents exactly zero change from fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand years ago.
• Returning to that "already" above, assuming that there is some sort of measurable effect, is it the beginning of a trend, the end of some sort of adjustment period, a temporary blip or what?

Of course, this is just an off-the-cuff reaction to someone's review of a book that I've not read a word of -- which possibly serves to support Carr's original point.

Many years ago I was sitting in the living room of a house I lived in when a roommate from Europe wandered in and, seeing I was flipping through channels, asked if anything was on. This was back when European TV typically had way fewer channels than a US cable setup. Without thinking, I started going through the channels in order, at a steady beat of one every couple of seconds, narrating as I went: "That's baseball ... that's just bad videos and commercials ... I've seen that episode already ... that guy's just obnoxious ... that's just Gilligan's Island" The roommate's jaw steadily dropped. "How can you know all that just from a second or two?"

A fair question, but the sad truth is that once you've been through a selection of several dozen channels a few times too many, it becomes all too familiar. Sometimes just the channel number is enough, sometimes it's easy to recognize a face or a setting.

To me, the disquieting bit was not that my brain could pick up cues from previous experience that quickly. That particular circuitry has obvious survival value and has doubtless been in our wiring in some form or another for a good long time. The disquieting bit was that I had the information in my head to retrieve in the first place. I'd obviously spent enough time planted in front of the TV to recognize Bob Denver on sight. With all due respect to the late Mr. Denver, that's not necessarily a happy realization.

Was TV changing the way I processed information, or had my TV watching skewed the information I had on hand to process? Maybe both?

And thus has a quick throwaway post morphed into a not-quite-so-quick rumination on the nature of memory. Am I supposed to have the attention span to still be writing and revising this, or was I supposed to have quit after the first 140 characters?

Football on the web

(and by "football" I mean FIFA, not NFL)

Other sources drive plenty of web traffic, but if you want lots of people on a site all at once, a sporting event is the way to go. The latest case in point, of course, is the World Cup, which, according to ESPN, was producing over 12 million hits per minute, or about half again the traffic for the 2008 US presidential election (the previous record holder).

Likewise, twitter has been seeing upwards of 3000 tweets per second, comparable to the Lakers-Celtics NBA final. Normal traffic is more like 700 tweets per second.

Lest talk of presidential elections and NBA finals give too much of a US-centric impression, ESPN cites a measurement of "total mentions in social media" for the month leading up to the Cup. Far and away the top entry, ahead of hosts South Africa and well ahead of the US, are England.

But then, England have a fair bit to talk about.

This one has a little bit of everything

For quite a while, the Did you feel it? link on the USGS web site has given the general public a chance to report earthquakes. This allows the seismologists to get a quick fix on the location and intensity of a quake before their instruments can produce more precise results -- seismic waves take time to travel through the earth.

This is a nice bit of crowdsourcing, somewhat akin to Galaxy Zoo, but it depends on people getting to the USGS site soon after they feel an earthquake. Some people are happy to do just that, but it's not necesarily everyone's top priority. So now the USGS has started searching through Twitter for keywords like "earthquake" or "shaking", and they're finding enough to be useful. The tweets range from a simple "Earthquake! OMG!" to something more like "The ceiling fan is swaying and my aunt's vase just fell off the top shelf," which gives some idea of magnitude.

As with Twitter in Iran, tweets are a great primary source of information, but you need to sift through them to get useful data. As with Google Flu, mining tweets doesn't require active cooperation from the people supplying the data. Rather, it mines data that people have already chosen to make public. In the case of Google Flu, Google is trying to use its awesome power for good by mining information that people give up in exchange for being able to use Google. (you have read Google's privacy policy, haven't you?) With Twitter, the picture is much simpler: The whole point is that you're broadcasting your message to the world.

It should come as no surprise that tweets about seismic activity are much more useful if you know where they came from (though even the raw timestamp should be of some use). Recently (November 2009), Twitter announced that its geotagging API had gone live. This allows twitterers to choose to supply location information with their tweets. The opt-in approach is definitely called for here, but even so there are serious questions of privacy. Martin Bryant has a good summary, to which I'll add that information about your location over time is a very good indicator of who you are.

Real-time Google

[Not to be confused with Google Instant, which shows search results in real time.]

I tend to operate somewhat slower than real time myself, so I may not get around to investigating Google's latest magical trick, real-time search, right away, but for me what jumped out of CNET's article on it wasn't the inevitable Google-Twitter partnership, but that

Real-time search at Google involves more than just social-networking and microblogging services. While Google will get information pushed to it through deals with those companies, it also has improved its crawlers to index and display virtually any Web page as it is generated.

That's been coming along, by degrees, for a while, but it still seems kind of eerie.

[Sure enough, by the time I could decide that 'real-time search, right away, but for me what jumped out of' would be unique enough to find this post, and put it into Google, it was already in the index. Granted, Blogger is Google territory. Still pretty slick, though]

60 Minutes and the MPAA: Postscript

In the last few posts on this topic (and I hope this will be the last one for a while), I tried to keep the 60 Minutes bashing toned down to a dull roar and concentrate more on the technical and economic issues. And besides, as it turns out, others have done it better and funnier [Unfortunately this link appears dead, as in not-even-on-the-Wayback-Machine dead.  I no longer remember what it said, but I'm fairly sure it was pretty funny.  Sic transit ... --D.H. May 2015].

From the first link, I learned that 60 Minutes has gotten this one wrong once before, and from the second I learned how to fill up an entire web page in order to display a message of no more than 140 characters. "Twitterati", eh?

Pop culture imitating life imitating ... oh never mind

Since you have a web connection, I'll assume you've heard the story already. In any case I don't really have much to say about it. I guess I just had to write it down and look at it to make sure I got it right.

Teen idol Miley Cyrus was until recently one of the most followed tweeters on twitter with over a million followers (a whole megacommunity, if you will). Then she woke up one day and realized "I was kind of just like over tweeting about what I was doing instead of actually doing it." and "I complained that I wanted my private life more private but I’m the one who is giving the world access to it.” So she deleted her account.

So far nothing out of the ordinary, except for the million followers part. Any number of people, myself included, have been sucked into the vortex of some net.timesink and decided that quitting cold turkey would be best for all involved.

But then she went the next step and put up a YouTube rap about it.

As of this writing there have been about 3.5 million views.

Is it OK to tweet "movie" in a crowded firehouse?

Last week the G20 met in Pittsburgh. Amid the obligatory protests, one person was arrested for using Twitter to tell protesters that the cops were coming. George Washington University law professor Paul Butler gave an analysis on NPR. From a Field Notes perspective, the key quotes are:

[I]ntent or motive is key. So if the government can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the idea was to help the protesters evade the police and to prevent the protesters' illegal activities from being discovered, then they've broken the law. But that's a lot that the government will have to prove and, you know, it may be difficult based on the evidence. [Earlier, Butler argues that telling protesters where the cops are could just as well be aimed at helping them conform to the law by making sure they know where protests are and are not permitted].

[T]he law is used to adapting to new technology, you know, for - there was a time when the telephone was new. And then there was another time when computers were new. And people used these new instruments for both legal activity and for political organizing and sometimes for illegal activity. And what law has to do is to figure out the difference.

From what I can make out, the gist is this: This particular case involving twitter touches on some very tricky issues of free speech, but the trickiness stems from the issue of free speech in general, not from the medium -- Twitter in this case. More specifically, the trickiness stems largely from the difficulty of proving intent, a difficulty not, so far, significantly affected by any known communication technology.

Still not twittering

I recently said that Twitter was a crucial part, but not the only crucial part, of getting information out of Iran (and in similar situations). Since then, this has only been reconfirmed. Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr, the blogosphere and other "new media" have played a central role in events.

So why don't I have a Twitter account? It's a simple case of the general vs. the particular. In general, Twitter has been highly useful (so far, the Iran story still seems to get more traffic Celebrity du Jour). But I still don't see a particular need. I just don't have a pressing need to send short messages to an indeterminate group of interested people.

If I want to send a short message to a co-worker, I walk over and tell them, or send an email. In a previous job, not everyone was in the same office, so we used IM a lot. If I want to send a short message to a personal friend, I call them or email them. If I want to fire an arrow into the virtual air for anyone to catch (watch that sharp point -- this is what comes of mixing metaphors), I write a blog post. I find I have time to do that every few days (the baker's dozen was a bit of an anomaly).

Your milage may vary. If you're a news provider, a minor celebrity, a street protestor, someone with an active online social life, or probably many other kinds of person, it does vary. So far, though, I haven't found myself in any of those groups.

[I don't recall if I titled that post before "tweet" was standard, or was too indifferent to know that it was standard, or was deliberately twitting the tweeters, but in any case I still don't tweet, for pretty much the same reasons as given here --D.H. Jan 2016].