If It Quacks Like A Duck

This morning, Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman gave her take on Twitter, the Internet, and Iran.

The Not-Quite-Twitter Revolution shows all the virtues and vices of the Internet. The ease and flow of information. The difficulty of knowing its accuracy and meaning. It’s like searching for medical advice in an online world of quacks and cures. If there’s anything we have learned, it’s that the need for guides - and dare I say trusted guides - is greater than ever.

As an editor, her comments made me sigh (a little, at least) with relief. Like a principal at a loud, bustling middle school who can rein in the rowdy students, the blogosphere--and Twitter--need some firm voices of reason to guide the masses. We're still working on figuring out who those people will be, and how their points of view and guidance can cut through the sargasso sea of online voices.

What Does the White House Think?

I love that Obama's posting policy updates on Facebook (and Twitter, though my FB account is less overwhelming and more useful for news like this). And something he mentioned in this statement on Iran may be one of the many quotes he'll be remembered for: "Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away." Gives me goosebumps. 

And a note on social media's role in the situation: Twitter's being given much of the credit for promoting, or at least raising awareness, of the uprising in Iran ("The Twitter Revolution, anyone?), yet the focus on social media's role in the situation is dampening the awareness, imo, of the human suffering taking place. Let's hope there are more tweets on fundraising and practical ways that Americans can be of assistance, instead of merely being informed of the madness taking place. The last report on MSNBC as I write this indicates Mir Hossein Mosavi is asking for a national strike to start if he's arrested. 

'Vanguard Journalism' Grows More Dangerous

With the splintering of the media into millions of blogs, it's growing more difficult to make an impact on an audience--let alone the 18-to-34 demographic. And that may be in part to blame for the imprisonment of two U.S. journalists.

This New York Times article illustrates how journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, currently sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean labor camp for trespassing, may have been detained in part because their employer Current TV, was struggling for audience share, and the women were emboldened to get their story--on refugees--no matter how dangerous the pursuit.

An excerpt: “There’s an impetus with any upstart news organization that you have to be bolder and you have to be more aggressive than other news organizations to get attention for your stories,” said Kevin Sites, a freelance journalist who covered conflicts for Yahoo. “That has to be admired. That also has a real inherent risk in it.”

The Blogosphere Gets Punk'd

Hilarious. 

Remember playing telephone as a kid? "She sells sea shells by the seashore" would morph into nonsense once it made it past just two or three kids. 

Check out this cluster, compliments of Twitter. The 19-hour timeline is especially enlightening. Bloggers and journalists didn't bother to check facts, and a rumor spread like wildfire, mostly thanks to Twitter. 

Here, media outlets from MSNBC to the New York Times pick up an AP story that was based on a Tweet that was based on a not exactly fact-based Variety story that involves Ashton Kutcher and--get this--Twitter's (alleged) plans for starting a TV show. Not until Jay Rosen of NYU thinks to go straight to the source does the truth come out. 

Confession: MSN Entertainment ran the AP story in a prominent chunk of online real estate, next to a photo of Kutcher. I don't have the stats on how many readers clicked, but my conservative estimate is a million or more--before I spotted this story around 4:30 PST and had the editor yank the link.

 http://www.mediabistro.com/baynewser/soc_media/twitter_tv_show_story_burns_some_journos_makes_others_shine_117367.asp