Dave Winer says he’s going to be our discussion facilitator.

He begins with the story of BloggerCon, the first US blogging conference, in 2004. They invited the political bloggers, but the conference cost $595 [or 494 — sorry, missed it], so Dave added a second day that would be free. He asked himself what blog would do about it. So, he tried to get good discussion leaders who would act like a reporter who’s developing a story from the sources in the room. He tells us he’s going to run this session at Reboot that way.

Audience: Sometimes it’s good to listen to an expert. And if you don’t have a strong facilitator, things can get hijacked.

Dave: Yes, it depends on the quality of the facilitator. Some got it, some didn’t. Jeff Jarvis, who was a former reporter, completely got it. I get goosebumps thinking about it.

Audience: The media are part of the mess.

Dave: A big part of it. [I can see this is going to be difficult to live blog!]

Aud: But people can put lies up on the Net. Everyone has their own spin.Now we don’t know who to trust. How do we know what to trust?

Dave: It’s hard to find anybody you can trust. You have to develop your own sense of triangulation, i.e., what happened at the intersection of various opinions.

Euan Semple: Each of us has different leverage, and we have to be aware of that.

Dave: Yes. For example, I have more leverage in this room because my mic is always on. In fact, I want to use that leverage to ask a different question. I think Twitter is a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future. Yes? And what would you like from Twitter?

Matthias: I follow you, and you ignore the 140 character limit. I’m not complaining. But 140 chars aren’t enough for much of journalism.

Dave: I’d like Dave to have a time-expired unfollow: Unfollow but automatically refollow after 24 hrs.

Aud: With Jaiku, we could follow a discussion because they had threaded conversations. And wrt news: At the 140 conf in NYC, it was fascinating watching Al Jezeera using Twitter to get stories out of the West Bank. They were twittering from riots and attacks, and collecting them on a page on their site. On the other hand, it can be a source of misinformation.

Bruce Sterling: I’d like to read some tweets. (He reads spambot tweets using the hashtag #reboot11.) It seems to be a natural progression. If twitter is the future of media, it’s got enough spam to beat humans into a bloody pulp.

Aud: As The Victorian Internet made clear, media are always spammed.

Dave: And how do you keep the garbage out of Wikipedia?

Aud: I read the article that said that tech has always been instrumental to journalism. E.g., the journalist pyramid was due to the telegraph: You had to put the most important stuff first in case you lost the connection.

Dave: What do you do when you’re following someone who says something you don’t like?

Aud: During the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict I didn’t unfollow people with extreme opinions I disagree with.

Dave: I like extreme opinions that are respectfully stated because they often get me to think. I have strong opinions on that conflict, but when I stated them, some people unfollowed me and cut me off. That’s up to them, but I don’t cut them off.

Dave: By the way, if you’re moderating a session like this, the moderator needs to be strong.

Aud: Twitter needs a better reputation system.

Dave: Right now the reputation system is merely the number of followers.

Aud: Whenever you have a community, 90% are lurkers, 9% occasionally contribute, and 1% do all the work. We need a renaissance in critical thinking.

Me: I’d like to see Twitter remove the public display of the number of followers.

Dave: That would create what we call a “shit storm.” As the session ends, I’d like us all to think about what we’d like to see from Twitter, what we can add, etc.

[Because of the discursive nature of this session, I’ve done a particularly poor job liveblogging it.]

[Tags: dave_winer twitter ]

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Nature News is twittering the Apollo 11 moon landing as a 40th-year commemoration. More here.

[Tags: twitter moon apollo_11 ]

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Chris Soghoian has posted an open letter to Google, asking it to make encryption the default. This is in line with the talk he gave recently at the Berkman Center.

[Update later that day: Two hours after releasing the letter, Google agreed to try setting encryption as the default for a subset of users, as a trial. If it works out, they’ll consider expanding it.]

Also, Jonathan Zittrain has posted about why the Iranians have problems blocking Twitter. [Tags: google security iran twitter ]

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Q: How do you define social media at Whirlpool?
Brian Synder: It has to be defined separately for each area, and we tie it back to business objectives. We track share of voice and favorability. On customer service, we do interesting text mining.
Lee Aase (Mayo Clinic): We use the free tools that are available. “The need for measurement varies inversely with the amount of money you spend on it.” We use the measurement tools to prove the value of what we’re doing.

Q: Your biggest challenge?
Marcel Lebrun (Radian6): We only measure if there’s a practical purpose. Social media are now multi-purpose. We use social media for every possible purpose. So, it’s disrupting everything in the enterprise that has to do with reaching out to customers. But those different practices have different business goals and thus different needs for measurement.

Q: Where it’s going?
Marcel: In the past six months, we’ve gone from explaining what social media is, to businesses understanding that their brand is the sum of all the conversations about it.

[Missed some. Sorry]

Q: How do you measure influencers for a brand?
Marcel: We integrate a bunch of digital breadcrumbs and social metrics. We measure things like how often a person talks about a subject, how much comments, how many unique comments, inbound links, which ones of those are also talking about that topic. Influence is very topic-centric. You sometimes want to see total reach, and sometimes you just want to find the topic geeks.

Q: How do you determine sentiment?
Brian: Synergy1 has humans reading the posts. The Tensity program automates this.
Lee: We eyeball it. And we’re looking for the really positive ones so we can spread the word and engage.
Brian: We look to engage by actually talking about product issues. E.g., an unhappy customer was tweeting about a product arriving damaged three times. We talked with him and redesigned the packaging based on his suggestions. We’ve taught some of our customer care phone folks how to engage via social media.
Marcel: The bulk of brands are at the listen stage. But Dell has a full blogger outreach team, focused on different kinds of users. The measure quantitatively and qualitatively (e.g., stories).

Marcel: The fastest way to get a new feature into a product is to tweet it. The developers get excited. They like being in touch.

[Tags: nms09 marketing twitter pr social_media cluetrain ]

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Elizabeth Losh of UC Irvine is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “From the Crowd to the Cloud: Social Media and the Obama Administration.” She looks at “institutions as digital content creators.”

She begins by pointing to a Congressional hearing in which someone unknowingly referred to some footage from Battlefield 2, in which you can play on either side, as proof that Jihadists are recruiting on the Net.

In the 2008 election, McCain had a series of rhetorical disasters when using social media, Liz says. McCainSpace, she says, was “an unmitigated disaster.” She also points to the mashups done with greenscreen videos of McCain. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, used social media well. It used low bandwidth interactivity effectively (e.g., online tax calculator). And third parties injected memes.

So, how much change has happened now that Obama is president?

It’s not all that difference. She compares 4parents.gov, an abstinence site put up by the Bush administration. The Obama administration has kept it pretty much the same, except that some of the conversation starters have been slightly modified. Ready.gov/kids has moved from featuring mountain lions as the guardians of children (an odd choice, says Liz) to Muppets. The Bush admin did some health initiatives using SecondLife, she points out.

How much privacy? Whitehouse.gov uses YouTube.com and has responded to concerns about the privacy implications. When you leave a .gov domain, it signals that you are leaving a protected area. Liz wonders about the efficacy of using disclaimer language, however. At Change.gov, if you decided to apply for a job, you start getting a lot of emails from the transition team.

The State Dept. Blog, “unfortunately named DipNote,” has been expanded. They twitter now. On Twitter, they’ve responded to citizen questions. E.g., Rebecca MacKinnon pointed out that a Chinese citizen had been arrested. The State Dept. tweeted that they were looking into it, although that tweet was deleted from Twitter shortly afterward. Rebecca also noticed that State Dept. photos posted on Flickr were marked as copyrighted; State now gives them Creative Commons licenses. Liz points to the CC notice and the DMCA takedown notice on the same page at Change.gov and says that there we see the manifestation of the conflict between acknowledging the culture of sharing and the support of existing rules.

She worries about the “googlization of government,” i.e., commercial entities hosting info that is part of the public record. E.g., gov’t sites that use Google Maps.

At Recovery.gov, you are encouraged to “share your story.” But what happens to those comments? How are they archived? Which ones will be displayed. They say in six months they’ll start posting that material, but it’s not clear how.

Q: [me] Whitehouse.gov has started posting at Facebook where people can comment…
A: And this is a disaster for archiving.
Q: What would you do with comments at Whitehouse.gov blog?
A: I’d like to see moderated comments. I do understand that there are limited government resources. Creating digital versions of Congressional records would maybe be a better way to spend the money.

Q: By going onto Facebook, the Admin is reaching out into civic society. That conversation would have been in coffee shops and not part of the public level. So maybe this shouldn’t be archived. How do we draw the lines as the lines between public and private are being blurred?
A: It’s a complicated thing. Suppose there are responses from officials to comments on FB? These are always difficult issues. [Paraphrasing!]

Q: Does government data include the back and forth between citizens? If we say it’s part of the public record, the gov’t won’t be able to participate, or build helpful stuff, as quickly. Would we want an archived federal Twitter that was crappy but kept a permanent record? Should the gov bring more of these social tools in house, or use existing, commercial sites and give up on including everything in the permanent record?
A: I tend toward wanting more stuff in public and archived. Let’s think about harvesting some of the discourse going on in the crowd.

Q: It seems like they’re doing lots of experimentation without the backbone of a full, stable archive behind it. Is this experimentation is leading us into an unknown state…?
A: The Archive is archiving some material on third party sites. The WhiteHouse.com blog is impersonal and press-release-y, while the TSA blog (started under Bush) is folksy. So, some of these experiments have histories.

A: I’d give Recovery.gov low marks for transparency because the PDFs are packed with charts that are not reusable.

Q: Social media is relatively new but and people express things that they don’t want known 5 years later…
A: A student applying for a job as a police officer found that they looked at his FB page and the pages of his friends. In the old days, they would have called his friends and asked questions.
Q: We’ve shifted the line between public and private life. Are we going to be able tor retract things from the public record?
A: That will be an issue.

Q: Any examples of the next frontier or participation, namely direct democracy
A: They still count emails. It’s quantitative, not qualitative. I worry about pseudo-interactivity, such as town hall meetings and the use of the Internet for political spectacle. That’s why I worry about these “share your stories” sites.

Q: During the Malagasi coup, people in Madagascar started talking about the deposed president finding sanctuary in the US Embassy, using Twitter. That could have flash-mobbed the embassy. Within 7 mins, the US embassy had responding, tweeting that the rumor was false. Can we give Obama a little bit of a break? All of us engaged in social media will screw up dozens of times …
A: That’s why we shouldn’t be cheerleaders. “I’m impressed by many of the social media efforts, but I think this form of criticism is important to do.”
Q: How do we encourage people to experiment in these spaces? As people go into these tools, they’re inept at first. At what point does the criticism discourage government officials from experimenting?
A: Many of my criticisms are that they’re not doing enough. Not enough commenting, with data representation, experimenting with new forms of participation.

Q: How much of out-of-the-box thinking are they doing with social media?
A: Theyre usually using them the way people already do. I wish they’d be more experimental.

Q: A crowd consists of the people who are uninformed. Government is about managing uncertainty. But if the info you get is biased and uninformed, you can’t manage. What’s the role of the crowd?
A: I don’t take as dark a view of the crowd. You can create political spectacles where a crowd is just a display, but you can get more participatory forms. There can be smart mobs. There are ways they can participate that are meaningful. The Obama admin is trying to take advantage of social occasions that are oriented around civic identity, not persuasion. “As a rhetorician, this is an interesting administration to watch.”

Q: Are Republicans inherently bad at social media?
A: Not at all. Sam Brownback had a great Web site. It does not divide easily along partisan lines.
Q: It depends in part on the demographics of the party. Libertarians have an incredible presence on line.
Q: Markos Moulitas says that Republican’s political philosophy leads them to be uncomfortable with bottom-up media…
A: Republicans do seem to like talk radio, where only a few get to participate.

Q: There was a time when there were a small number of leftwing political blogs and they bemoaned the fact that they had so little Web presence compared to conservative and libertarian blogs, around 2002-3. The populist element is present in all parties and drives a lot of social media. Some believe that the Dean campaign derailed because it thought the comments on its blog were representative of the world…
A: The postmortems are still being done.

Q: I’m not sure how I feel about the gov’t investing enough in social media to do it well. Experimentation is great, but totally botching it at the federal level isn’t good for anyone…
A: Good search on gov’t websites should be a top priority. To get all of Bush’s signing statements, you’d have to know to search on “shall construe.”

Q: Don’t you need a proprietary company to provide those services?
A: We need to be asking questions. [Tags: egovernment egov e-gov social_media facebook twitter transparency ]

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Joi Ito posts about whether we’ve agreed upon the syntax of retweeting: If I want to twitter one of your tweets and add my own comment, do I do it as “RT @you: your comment Me: My comment” or as “RT @you:your comment [Me: my comment]” or what? Of course, there was a bunch of twittering about this, which Joi captures.

It’s fun to watch syntax emerge. As Ethanz tweets: “Microformat development in 140 chars or less…”

[Tags: twitter standards ethan_zuckerman joi_ito everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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You can tell that Twitter has added something important to the ecosystem by the volume of the snickering. If you dismiss it by asking “Why do I care what you had for breakfast?”, there are only two choices. First, you’re saying everyone on Twitter is an idiot. Second, you don’t understand what you’re talking about. As a Twitterer (dweinberger), I’m going to go with Option #2.

Twitter’s success tells us a lot…including the following 4.5 points:

1. Twitter in its native form assumes we’re ok with not keeping up with the abundance. Tweets are going to scroll by when you’re not looking, and you’re never going to see them. Twitter assumes you will let them go, the way most of us cannot leave unread the messages in our inbox.

2. Social asymmetry addresses the scaling problem. At Twitter, the people you follow are not necessarily the people who are following you. That’s exactly not how mailing lists and weekly status meetings work, and Twitter’s approach impedes the back-and-forth development of ideas. But, maybe that’s not what Twitter is primarily about. And the asymmetry means that some people can have lots of followers but still participate as listeners.

2.5. (Maybe in an age of abundance, the back and forth development of ideas isn’t the only process. Sure, having a small group kick around an idea often works. But maybe in some instances it also works for an idea to be lobbed like a beach ball from one group to another, each putting their own spin on it.)

3. Twitter is an app that scales as as platform. That is, it comes with a set of features that makes it usable and popular. But it’s open enough to enable users and third parties to add capabilities that make it useful for what it wasn’t designed for. For example, a convention has arisen among users that “RT” will stand for “re-tweet” when you want to publish someone else’s tweet to one’s own followers.

4. We’ll complicate simple things as much as we have to. We’ll invent “hashtags” (tags that begin with #, embedded within a tweet) to let people find tweets on a particular topic, getting past the “it already scrolled past” issue. We’ll invent layers upon layers of aggregators of tweets. We’ll just bang away on it as hard as we have to in order to accrete significance. We truly are meaning monkeys. [Tags: twitter everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Ethan Zuckerman has pointed us at the coverage of the military coup in Madagascar, a country of 20+ million folks with almost not mainstream media on the ground. The news coming out is getting here via Twitter (#madagascar) and blogs. GlobalVoices is one good source.

[Tags: madagascar blogging media twitter journalism ethan_zuckerman ]

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David Berkowitz has a terrific post at MediaPost about why Skittles has removed its own content from its Web site and is instead featuring the Wikipedia page about Skittles, a page that aggregates Skittles-mentioning tweets, and its Facebook page. David writes:

Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

…

By just about any rational indication, Skittles went too far. Highlighting Twitter Search in particular seems absurd, especially since Twitter tends to skew older relative to other social media properties, and Skittles seems to target a younger audience. I came home and showed Skittles.com to my wife. Her first reaction, before I even told her why I was showing it to her, was, “That’s it?” Then she added, “What happens if you don’t care about Twitter or don’t know about Twitter? It seems like it’s only for people who are really technical. I just wouldn’t care.”

But why would anyone care about what Skittles has to say? What, pray tell, could Skittles ever say that was so important, unless we woke up one day to find out that eating Skittles is the world’s tastiest cancer cure, or alternatively that Skittles lower men’s sperm count. Then, perhaps, the world will listen.

It goes on from there. And I say: OMG, I actually went to — and enjoyed! — Skittles.com. Awesome!

[Tags: skittles twitter marketing cluetrain ]

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Marcus Brown parodies twitter, social software and literary criticism rather savagely and very funnily, picking on some of the leading twitterers. (And the fact that his first video shows him pondering Cluetrain is not exactly an endorsement of Cluetrain.) Sure, it’s unfair to pick a handful of tweets out of context, and twitterers don’t claim to be writing deathless literature. Nevertheless … well, make up your own mind. (Thanks for the link, RageBoy!)

[Tags: twitter humor parody ]

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