It’s not hard to listen to the mainstream media discuss new media because they’re clueless as to how to use it—they generally are. But people being generally ignorant of the latest trends on the Internet and the Web is not such a bad thing.[^1] The new media move fast and it’s only some of us that take it upon themselves as a hobby to find out what’s out there. What is difficult to listen to is how much credibility the mainstream media gives themselves. In a recent panel at the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) several members of the mainstream media discussed how they felt about the new influence of twitter.

Frankly, even the author of the Techcrunch article made some questionable statements that sound like typical journalistic hyperbole: “The pursuit of ‘now’ is conditioning us to expect information as it happens, whether it’s accurate or developing.” In other words, you can have it now with a greater probability that it’s wrong, or you can wait and it will be more accurate. Since when are accuracy and immediacy mutually exclusive? Read more…

Just a thought: if for any reason you wanted to follow only close friends or family on Twitter and wanted a way to more privately communicate with only that group of people, you could create a Twitter clubhouse. Set up an account that only allows invited individuals to see updates. When a person (who should be allowed in the group) requests membership, you (the presumed admin) would not only allow the individual to join but also give them the keys to the clubhouse (login and password for the private Twitter account). What this allows for is a few things:

1. Everyone that is allowed to follow the clubhouse can see its postings (including @ posts to the clubhouse).
2. Any member of the clubhouse can DM the clubhouse account privately and anyone in the clubhouse will see it.
3. Any member of the clubhouse can publicly @ the clubhouse

Obviously, this is not as fancy as a clubhouse could be. For instance, only one person would get the privilege of receiving DMs on a device. With most systems (like Tweetie for the iphone and ipod) that’s a fairly moot problem (since you can switch between accounts with relative ease and see DMs that way). But it would be a good way to create a somewhat cloistered area for casual semi-public messaging. I work on a collective novel over at Jelly Halo right now and despite the great things PBworks have set up, there isn’t a communication system that would be as “collected” in one place as this method would.

I’m generally having one of those days where you sit down to do “something” on the computer and three hours have passed and you’ve done a lot but not the “something.”  I can generally avoid this problem because I have a bunch of online tools that help me do it, but today I’m working in someone else account and those tools aren’t available as easily.[^1] That’s when it dawned on me, when did my bookmarks toolbar become so really, really important? Read more…

This is kind of tough, because I am a huge fan of Peter Gabriel—not only as a musician, but as an interactive artist who has often been very far ahead of the curve.  But this latest effort, a new site to help you sort through all the media out there is a real loser.  One among many, in fact.

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I’ve been trying out a couple of what you would call social feed aggregators. Yeah, I know. Ugh. But what friendfeed.com and socialthing.com are trying to accomplish is just exactly that—getting all your information about friends on all your various social sites (think Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Shelfari, Blogger, etc). You want to keep up with all the news and activity from your friends on those sites; wouldn’t it be nice to do it in one place, right?

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