We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
WaterstonesUse #voucher code BG2298 at checkout for an extra 10% off when you spend £25. Excludes Reader, eBooks & accessories. Please RT!
Happy Bastille Day! Today I'm releasing my debut novel, The French Revolution, on Twitter. As far as I can tell... less than a minute ago
My immediate reaction, were I in your shoes, would be incredulity. Who reads long-form literature on Twitter? Who reads long-form anything online?
The short answer is: nobody. The internet is a universe of abundance, overwhelming us with creative videos and fascinating articles and a Pandora's Box of endlessly entertaining distractions. With this reality in mind, I don't expect people to read my whole novel online.
Our new forms of writing—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—all have precedents, analogue analogues: a notebook, a postcard, a jotting on the back of an envelope. They are exceedingly accessible. That it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels.
Amateurs and experts share real estate on our screens. We scroll down to add our comments; we join the written fray. The rush of prose is intense, but also exhilirating. So many hats are in the ring.
Social network research is about getting to know the people who are in the know, rather than searching online for archived documents that may be out of date.
I'm open to everything. When you start to criticize the times you live in, your time is over.
Want to work at Mashable as a full time writer or editor? We'd love for you to join us!
Please note, however, that our applications process has a number of key requirements: you must have prior experience writing for a Technorati Top 100 blog and you must be a regular Twitter user with 500 followers or more.
If you do not meet these requirements, please visit our guest writer page to see whether you may be accepted as a guest writer: http://mashable.com/writers/
Every year, nearly 300 powerful media executives gather here [Sun Valley, Idaho] at the secretive Allen & Co. summit, to which the press is not invited. Perennial attendees include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. As the definition of media has expanded to include the Internet, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams have been added to the guest list.
“No one had any answers” about making money on the Internet, said [Ken] Auletta, who moderated the panel.
Malone said he didn’t think that an advertising model made sense on Twitter, but there was some hope for a subscription model. “Sooner or later people will be willing to pay for these services,” he said. Warren Buffett privately told him that he would pay $5 a month for YouTube, he added.
English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
DavidLammyMP: Great to see Google again today in their London office. Internet services are changing the copyright game, important conversations to be had
britishlibrary: Good knees-up in Piazza, much enjoyed by the bare-chested historical bibliographers
cshirky "Facts used to nail down arguments. Now they start them. We are in the middle of the great unnailing." D.Weinberger #pdf09
I’d like to think that there’s an even better reason, though: I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, everyone’s gone quiet because they’ve [the bloggers] won.
Think about it: the driving force behind the success of the blogosphere in the UK has been the desire to break open the Westminster bubble; to force our Government, and our national press, to listen to the people, rather than endlessly circling around themselves. To expose the lies and the scandals at the heart of our political system.
And now we have. Victory is ours. The bloggers are being taken seriously, and the Government is on the run.
You know you are on to something here. I am finding it hard to break new ground when all the papers read like a Guido post from a year ago – “snouts in the trough”, “they are all at it”, “jail MPs” etc.
But recently – over the past six months – I've noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I'm defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or Wordpress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn't think we'd suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google's Blogsearch.
Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it's still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it's a "retweet", echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest", which pointed to Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned".
Furniture store Habitat has apologised for causing offence after accusations it exploited unrest in Iran to drive online Twitter users to its products.
Keywords - called hashtags - such as 'Iran' and 'Mousavi' were added to its messages so people searching for those subjects would see the firm's adverts.
Users of the networking site reacted angrily and the posts were removed.
The retailer has said the use of the hashtags were "not authorised", but declined to say who was responsible.
Contributors to Twitter posted messages claiming Habitat should be "ashamed" and saying it was "piggy-backing" on the political situation in Iran.
One of the controversial messages - called tweets - which appeared before being removed by Habitat, read: HabitatUK: #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card.
"Librarians as a group are very spread out around the country, and they are really seizing on Twitter as a great way to network and spread information among themselves. They are also trying it out to give information about author events and closing times to their users," said Benedicte Page, libraries expert at the Bookseller. From Milton Keynes (@mklibraries) to Devon (@devonlibraries), Plymouth (@plymlibraries) to Newcastle (@toonlibraries), over 40 UK libraries are now using Twitter, and a "Twitter for librarians" course will be held by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) in September to encourage more to take it up.
...And what, to give this a
bit more focus, best expresses the souls of 21st century Americans?
First, of course, is literature. Perhaps we are simply part of the effete corps of
impudent snobs, but we concluded that no generation is complete without its
high writing --and an appreciation for what had come before. Dante,
Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and J.K. Rowling…surely these names still
meant something!
The second is Twitter.More than any other social networking tool, Twitter has
(at least for the last five minutes of Eonic time), refined to its purest form the
instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-
important age of info-deluge that is the essence of our contemporary world. As
such, it demands our attention – and gets it.
So what could be better than to combine the two?
IN ANTICIPATION OF THE LONG-AWAITED PUBLICATION OF DAN BROWN'S FIFTH NOVEL, THE LOST SYMBOL, ON SEPTEMBER 15 OF THIS YEAR, DOUBLEDAY IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE LAUNCH OF A SUMMER-LONG EVENT FEATURING AN ENIGMATIC ARRAY OF CODES, CRYPTIC TRIVIA, PUZZLES, SECRET HISTORY, MAPS, APHORISMS, CIPHERS, ARCANE KNOWLEDGE, AND MORE.
THERE WILL BE A NUMBER OF FOCAL POINTS. THELOSTSYMBOL.COM, NOW DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE IN APPEARANCE, WILL REVEAL MORE AS THE SUMMER ADVANCES. THERE, YOU WILL ALSO FIND LINKS TO THE OFFICIAL DAN BROWN FACEBOOK PAGE AND TO LOSTSYMBOLBOOK - THE OFFICIAL TWITTER PAGE FOR THE NOVEL. DAILY POSTS IN BOTH SPACES WILL CHALLENGE, INTRIGUE, EDUCATE AND ENTERTAIN!
ENJOY YOUR SUMMER...AND REMEMBER TO MARK SEPTEMBER 15TH ON YOUR CALENDARS - WITH A SYMBOL OF YOUR CHOOSING.
You liberated my life when you wrote and confirmed, black on white, what I was secretely thinking about Faith and Church. I gladly joined the ranks as one of your best fans.
Thank you
I have learned so much from your books!!!They have inspired me to study different religions, and sciences. When The Lost Symbol comes out you can count on me being the first to bye a copy!!
Talk some more about the sense of participation on Twitter. It seems to me that that has spurred an entirely deeper level of emotional connection with these events [in Iran].
Absolutely. I've been saying this for a while -- as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. But Twitter is also just a much more personal medium. Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement. We're seeing everyone desperate to do something to show solidarity like wear green -- and suddenly the community figures out that it can actually offer secure web proxies, or persuade Twitter to delay an engineering upgrade -- we can help keep the medium open.
Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments):
iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
Facebook - a social net with real utility
Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
Blogger - a printing press for everyone
Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute
In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before.
