Monthly Archives: April 2009

Balancing The Twitter Portfolio

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Search vs. Serendipity in our digital age. This isn’t just me, the topic is gaining some traction among thoughtful people, and it’s been on my mind lately so I figured I’d tap out a few thoughts of my own.

Today’s is about Twitter. This week, within 48 hours, I got no less than a dozen tweets about the Susan Boyle video. In fact, it seems many of the memes rocketing around the Interwebs flash across my Twitter feed multiple times.

This got me to thinking about the composite body of the people/entities I follow on Twitter (and in other channels). More specifically, I’ve come to wonder if, like an investment portfolio, my Twitter feed isn’t out of balance.

Could I be overexposed on some topics at the sacrifice of others? My ability to so granularly control the information I am exposed to via Twitter goes straight to the heart of the Search v. Serendipity quandry.

In short, digital media are great for search and pretty awful at serendipity (though there are some interesting randomizers out there). Digital media do a bang-up job of making it easy for me to find deeper content on topics I’m aware I am interested in. However, it’s much harder to discover new things by accident. This gets compounded each time I link my awareness to a friend or franchise that reflects my current interests.

Given the limitation of my conscious bandwidth – I’ve only got so many trackable tweets in me on a given day – am I wasting some of that limited awareness on redundant references to Susan Boyle, Flutter and the fall of Comic Sans?

Where am I getting exposure to contrarians? To the disconfirming insights that strengthen ideas? How frequently am I hearing about new thoughts on topics I don’t think about every day? Creativity is a big part of my career and my experience is that creativity comes from combing previously unrelated thoughts into something new. It therefore seems valuable to broaden my awareness.

To pull an analogy out of art school – is linking my awareness to friends, Twitter follows and RSS like demonstrating my individuality by wearing black just like the rest of my peers?

Browsing seems to be falling to the wayside in our search-centric world. Skimming headlines, thumbing through albums, pouring over bins of books, strolling through malls or rifling through magazine stands are all endangered (or at least declining) behaviors.

Ultimately, I believe my time and my conscious awareness are very valuable. That being said, maybe I need to rethink my information exposure as defined by my Twitter follows.

What would it do to my consciousness if I dropped a few digerati and grabbed a neocon or two? What would happen if I backed off the business publications and latched on to some physics or astrology? What new ideas would I be fed that I could in turn incorporate into my own thinking?

AIFF Nostalgia

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I just purchased a CD for the first time in years. The local bookstore had a sale. 50% off. Couldn’t help myself.

As I returned to my car I had a major nostalgia trip. I felt an adolescent excitement as my fingernail cut into the crease near the spine. I ripped into the packaging in the dark silence of the driver’s seat working through the sticker holding the jewel case closed as it tore free in small pieces. As I pried the case open, breaking off the final fingers of the sticker, I could smell the disc and like scents are so prone to do, it took me way back. I dropped it into the CD player in my car, tweaked the base and treble up a notch and sat back in the parking lot.

It felt like high school all over again.

Knowing that this makes me sound ancient, I mourn the loss of that experience in buying music today. (Say nothing for the better sound CD’s offer to MP3′s.)

I get why purchasing MP3s has taken off. I still buy most of my music that way. But there was something deliciously tactile about thumbing through the CD’s on display, dropping them on the car seat, opening the crinkly cellophane and sliding that disc into the dash.

Yeah, time moves on, things change, and some experiences are necessarily sacrificed in the name of innovation and progress. That said, I wish kids today could enjoy the experience I just relived.

For all it’s wonders, some things just don’t reproduce as well online.

(The album was Thin Lizzy if you’re curious.)

Only The News That’s Fit to Publish

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It only takes a brief perusal of the assorted headlines, blog postings and tweets, to see just how much the news industry is struggling with disruptive technologies today.

In pondering all this, I am struck by the relationship between the inherent intervals of various technologies and the ‘newsiness’of the news. ‘Bringing you breaking news’has been a long-time value proposition of the news industry but I’m not so sure it can survive.

By way of example, my Twitter feed is truly real-time news. It updates by the second. So fast in fact that I can’t keep up. In many ways its my personally-defined CNN news ticker (even if many of the headlines are obtuse and the TInyURL links blind).

Facebook (as a stand-in for traditional social networks) seems to run at an update interval of ‘a few times a day’. It’s news is hyper-local to me – not geographically but socially. And let’s face it, in this day and age, geography matters less and less in terms of the people we feel connected to.

Blogging seems to walk the line between ‘a few times a day’to ‘once daily’. The content tends to be longer and better reasoned. Blog topics can also be rather granular so I get a very concrentrated dose of a topic I am interested in.  In short, blog posts have a greater opportunity to be of higher quality than a tweet or even a Facebook update. I may not know the bloggers I follow (so they’re not as ‘local’) but I have chosen them because I like the way they think and write about the topics I am interested in. Often they also feel more ‘authentic’because I assume (often incorrectly) that they are pro-am writers and not salaried corporate suits.

So in comparison to traditional news sources, Twitter is faster, Facebook is more ‘local’and blogs have a higher perceived authenticity alongside longer, meatier content.

So what’s left for the commercial news industry to sell that these other guys don’t seem to be better at?

Here I’d point to the YouTube v. Hulu slugfest. While YouTube got a lot of hype (and market valuation) Hulu has actually made money, attracted advertising revenue and demonstrated a longer-term value proposition by focusing on professional calibre content.

Where YouTube saw the Internet as a social technology with media distribution capabilities, Hulu seems to see the Internet as a distribution system with social capabilities. This isn’t symantics, it’s carving out a competitive advantage.

What would happen if the news industry focused less on ‘breaking news’and more on ‘quality news narratives’? What if the news industry gave up reliance on the audience for fast, endless soundbytes and headlines and focused on reasoned discussion, in-depth analysis and professionally-assembled details. These are all things professional news companies should be able to do better than the UGC set.

If you think about it, a lot of what defines today’s professional news leaders are the people offering the editorial. Think Fox news. Think the op-ed section of the Times. While neither Fox nor the Times can be as fast as twitter or as local as Facebook or as authentic and granularly focused on single topics as the pro-am bloggers I like, it can deliver a production quality and talent base these other media can’t. Plus they’ve got the credentials to get into the right rooms with the right people to tell many types of stories – political, business, celebrity – first-hand.

When Gutenberg invented movable type it enabled anyone to produce text. That didn’t mean everyone’s text was worth reading, only that it could be made and distributed. Music production software has done the same for music. So have Podcasting, camcorders, blogging software, Twitter, etc.

All of these technologies enable anyone to publish. What they don’t do is assure quality. Quite the contrary, they bury us all in a lot of crappy content. For every piece that goes viral, most go nowhere. And a lot of the ‘viral’stuff is a blip on our radar that vanishes as quickly as it appears offering 15 minutes of fame and then a return to unpaid obscurity.

A professional news provider could still build its reputation on having the best imagery, the best produced video, the most reasoned, well-researched and articulated stories all presented by charismatic talent that resonates with an audience. This news provider would not replace my Twitter stream or my Facebook friends or my blog surfing, but it would be something that, when I got tired of the banality of everyday content, would be stimulating and remarkable.

Social media is a great equalizer – for good and bad. It is highly disruptive and the reality is, the available marketshare for professional news may shrink overall (just like most markets as they mature and consolidate). Some outfits will simply lose and disappear. Others will have to rethink their infrastructure from the ground up if they’re to keep the lights on and their employees paid. But among the millions churning out user generated content something professionally made and remarkable will always find an audience.

Despite our culture’s infatuation with all things user-generated, quality content will always provide value to a well-defined audience whose needs are being met. The trick then is to build a business that can efficiently create that quality content by leveraging all the tools available. Doing this may be ugly work, but such is the nature of adaption.

‘All the news that’s fit to print’might still be a useful governing principle. The focus must change from ‘all’(volume and speed) to ‘fit’(quality and value) and not necessarily assume ‘print’.