Twitter Admits Reliability Is Valuable?

Did I read the last two posts on the Twitter blog correctly?

They stated “You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning,” but instead they should have admitted that their service in the past few days has been intermittent at best.

On the heels of this, they then began today’s post with “We have a stated goal to make Twitter a reliable global communication utility. ” Really? Are they serious?

They have to know their service glitches have been lampooned in the blogosphere, and their credibility has seriously eroded as being a reliable (aka business-able) communication and microblogging (liveblogging?) tool. Many of us have started to rely on Twitter as a communication tool (via Web, BlackBerry, a whole host of applications, etc.), using it from everything from liveblogging to self-marketing and branding.

I know whenever I tell colleagues and friends about Twitter, the platform sounds so silly until I show people how it works and how I use it. Now, I really love Twitter. I like how my Tweets get archived daily on my own blog. How I am able to join a new organization and suddenly begin to have other people interested in reading my daily Twitter musings.

I really hope Twitter becomes more reliable. While this all this costs money, is there enough financing coming in to create and maintain the very reliability we all expect? 

Liveblogging 101

Our long-awaited presentation we are doing at this year’s Northern Voice has finally appeared on their website. As an all-volunteer conference, I really appreciate all the work and efforts the organizers are giving to make this year’s personal blogging and social media conference a success.

My session will be on Friday, February 22, 2008, from 14:00 – 14:30 (2:00-2:30pm) in a new track–Internet Bootcamp. Entitled Liveblogging 101, it is meant to introduce newbies to liveblogging.

As a technologist and qualitative researcher, I am really interested in how liveblogging is an act of involvement and participation. It is not a narrative of the events–that is stenography. It is an interactive co-creation of the event itself from the perspective of an active participant. This in fact summarizes what my blog title, Silence and Voice, is all about. With liveblogging, the silence is ended as participants take up and use their own voices to record the event as they experience it.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. If you want it nice and neat, buy a book.

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The New York Times Liveblogs?!

Nice to know that my interest in liveblogging and my newspaper of record, The New York Times, has finally embraced technology enough to begin liveblogging. Not just in name, but in practice. It seems they are liveblogging today’s Florida Primary.

With real-time video, one may ask why anybody would be interested in liveblogging at all? If that is the case, you may be interested in my upcoming session at Northern Voice’s Internet Bootcamp, where I will be presenting a session entitled Liveblogging 101.

Liveblogging:  Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic.

 

Northern Voice Bootcamp, Here I Come!

I am planning to attend this year’s Northern Voice 2008 in Vancouver. I will be presenting, with my colleague Robin Yap, at a new feature in the Moosecamp unconference, called Internet Bootcamp.

The proposal that Robin and I submitted is:

northernvoice2008square2.jpgLiveblogging as Active Participation

Do you want to actively report, interpret, and comment upon what happens around us in real time? Think only professional journalists can do this? If so, then think again! Liveblogging is a term for when people blog about events and presentations as they unfold, with all the personal feelings and thoughts through which we see the world. Unfiltered. Raw. Authentic. Liveblogging is active involvement, allowing us to both co-creator our meaning while we publish it on blogs in real time. This session will explore how people liveblog, its usefulness in an age of social media, and some best practices. A future research agenda will be also be explored.

This has not appeared on their website yet, but that is indeed what we are working on.

Do you liveblog? If not, consider attending our session! If you do, do you have any suggestions or recommendations about how or what we cover? This is something that many people do, and we are hoping we can create a forum to talk about this. Hopefully we can learn something from one another!

Attention Jurors

“We ask jurors in the hallway to come back into the main room. Have a seat and make yourselves comfortable.”

Here we all are, waiting . . .

“This is the end of your service.” Hurray!!!

They are going to give us a “Proof of Service,” which means that we do not have to serve again for a minimum of 2 years, and realistically we will not be called again for another 6 years. According to the laws of the State of New York, we will not again have to serve for 2 years. However, it is the practice within the County of New York (which is comprised of Manhattan) that we will not be called back for 6 years.

Wonderful!

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