I was lucky enough to be able to try out the WorldWide Telescope that Microsoft launched today and to talk to some of the folks who worked on the project for an article today. It's an amazing service that knits together 12 terabytes of data from telescopes on earth and in the sky.
These are the kinds of stories that makes it incredibly fun to be a journalist!
Here's this week's Digital Dish video show, in which we wonder whether the Microsoft/Yahoo dance is really over and size up Microsoft vs. Google and News Corp.'s slumping Internet revenues
Did you know that sometimes it's easier to write an article when you've done minimal reporting? It's true. You have the reporting equivalent of a tarp and two poles, you know exactly what to build. Get a lot of reporting, and things get much more confusion.
That's what's happening to me. I'm getting ready to write this story on Twitter (that scores of people are contributing to). I've gone through hundreds of comments and picked out ones that provide either quotes, links to stories or concrete examples of why Twitter matters (and what it's destined to become.) Just to give you an idea of how big and unwieldy that edited universe is, I'll cut and paste those snippets in the space below (click to see it.)
One of my favorites came from MikeMookie, when asked if Twitter downtime was a problem:
Twitter is "young" & free. My cable goes out? Pissed. My cell drops call? Pissed. Twitter down? Sux, but not pissed
If you think I've missed your important tweet, please leave a comment. Thanks.
Continue reading "Sorting through Twitter comments: overwhelmed"
Steve Rubel writes that the future belongs to deep specialists and asks if this is the demise of the Renaissance person--the Leonardo-types who can master multiple disciplines. He cites Seth Godin's book, The Dip.
Funny, I'm seeing the other side: the need for more Renaissance types. In a world of converging technologies, many exciting breakthroughs take place across disciplines, boundaries and borders. Advertisers can learn about network behavior from biology. The universe of nanotechnology is teeming with chemists, metallurgists, biologists all working together. I wrote last year about David Heckerman, a Microsoft researcher who followed his algorithms from spam-filters to HIV. The triumph of the iTunes wouldn't have happened without someone who could bring together music, software, business, and design. We could even throw in anthropology.
True, winners today need deep knowledge. They cannot be dilettantes. But they must also learn to communicate with and learn from people in other domains. They must venture out. Leonardo would fare just fine today. In fact, this world is made for people like him.
UPDATE: Instead of sentence by sentence, I'm now twittering just the topic sentences for each paragraph. The reason: To get people engaged, the sentence has to state a position and ask for information. A sentence that simply documents a point doesn't lead to anything. So people are providing the answers for each paragraph themselves.
I've done four sentences. Will try to digest it all by tomorrow morning, write the top of the draft, post it, and resume the Twitter exercise.
Here are the first four tweets:
1) Go ahead and laugh at Twitter. Plenty of trivia. (I'll put more detail in the story, but don't want to waste Twitter characters on it.) But businesses are coming up with all kinds of ways to harness microblogging...
2) What started as a watercooler for geeks is becoming a vital com. platform—with its own developer crowd. But now tech challenges:
3) Twit is tiny in social media. Only some half million active users. But influential. More venture funding? What's it worth?
4)Is Twitter just changeable cog in social media mix? Or with its fast-growing ecosystem of aps developers, will it be a platform?
To participate (and suggest the next sentences), go to Twitter and reply to @stevebaker. If you put #bwstory into your post (using 8 precious characters), your post will join all the others on at Twemes.com
I'll go along adding the tweets here, one per hour. I was thinking of cutting and pasting all the suggestions onto this blog post. But it's really easier to look at them on the Twemes site.
FRIDAY UPDATE: Actually, I find it easier yet on Summize. I'm feeling overloaded. I'm going to try writing a draft on Monday, linking to the Tweets. I'll post it here and we can go from there. Have a good weekend.
UPDATE: You can follow the story on this thread. the best way to keep up with the conversation is to follow this link. Starting at 2:30 eastern today, I'm going...
I'm talking to some BW colleagues about blogging today. Jeff Jarvis was in last week and gave a great talk. In fact, one of my colleagues, whom I already considered...
I was talking yesterday to Irene Greif, an IBM fellow who heads up IBM's collaborative user research, and her colleague, Joan Dimicco. Some nuggets: IBM's internal social network, BeeHive, has...
This week, we have a special guest, Peter Kafka from Silicon Alley Insider. (He and Arik used to work together at Forbes.) We dish on Microhoo (what else), the...
Fantastic comments on the future of social media. Thanks so much, and keep adding. This is a work in process. Here's one on the future of our careers that especially...
The growing meaningless of the word friend--and the need for a new taxonomy for relationships in the networked world.
In Blogspotting Senior Writer Stephen Baker and Associate Editor Heather Green take a look at how cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society. Whether its blogs or wikis, data crunching or data targeting, technology’s advances are reshaping the world that we live in.
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