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Scoble and Twitter in the Borneo Bulletin: the future of news?

Wow - a funny occurence, in light of my growing interest in Twitter of late. I was flipping through the Borneo Bulletin at a cafe in Brunei, and amidst the coverage of the catastrophic earthquake in China, stumbled across coverage of none other than the tech blogosphere’s two darlings: Robert “Andrew” Scoble and Twitter. It looks like a wire excerpt, but still fascinating to see in a tabloid format local Borneo paper…

“Twitters Beat Media in Reporting China Quake (Sanfrancisco, AFP): The world had real-time new about China’s massive earthquake as victim’s dashed out Twitter text messages while it took place, in what was being touted Tuesday as microblogging outshining mainstream news. As the earth shook with tragic consequences, people in parts of China that felt the quake used their mobiles to send terse messages provided by the San Fransisco-based Twitter Inc. News of the deadly catastrophe reached Twitter devotees such as blogger Andrew Scoble in San Francisco even before the massive tremblor, which killed more than 12,000 people in Szechuan province, was reported by news organizations and the earthquake-tracking US Geological Survey. “Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake while it was going on!” Scoble wrote in his popular Scobleizer blog. Twitters are abbreviated text messages that can be instantly posted on online bulletin boards and personal websites and sent to the mobile phones of selected friends.

For me, this post, found in this paper in this place highlights the parallelism rapidly emerging between the blogosphere and mainstream media: for breaking news and on the ground reporting, blogs and micro-blogging services are rapidly becoming the global-standard destination. Connecting web users and mobile users, first world and third, journalism with ad-hoc/off-the-cuff/street-cred reporting, the net is the first place more and more are turning - in the developing world, its setting a precedent that will shape the evolution of nascent news/communications/entertainment industries. The mainstream media is assuming a new shape as well: in depth coverage, background research, and historical context are services that are more easily provided by a news organization…

Anyway, in a nutshell: blogs/microblogging provides instant, unfiltered news; MSM provides a longer term perspective on a given story. Both have a place, neither is mutually exclusive. Its late, I’m tired, I hope this point is coming across - more on this later.

scoble twitter

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Track your Memes on Twitter!

Here’s some fun news: this afternoon I decided to figure out how to use the Twitter API, which is decidedly simple and functional. Anyway, if you’re a twitterholic, you can now get your dose of technology, automotive, environmental, or sun microsystems news via twitter - each of my memetrackers now merrily posts all of its front-page updates to a twitter account for your enjoyment!

TechWatching (tech and web): http://twitter.com/techwatching
SunMeme (sun micro): http://twitter.com/sunmeme
WheelScore (automotive): http://twitter.com/wheelscore
PlasticBasket (environmental): http://twitter.com/plasticbasket.net

On a sidenote, I’m appreciating the utility of Twitter more and more every day as a broadcast medium and selective news filter.

memetrackers, plasticbasket, sunmeme, techwatching, twitter wheelscore

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One more thing: PlasticBasket.net

Are you concerned about environmental issues? If so, get your hourly dose of breaking green news/issues/views at PlasticBasket.net.

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Follow Stories with Cluster Permalinks

I just rolled out a minor but important new feature across the memetracker network that I’m building (TechWatching, Wheelscore, SunMeme, PlasticBasket) - story cluster permalinks.

For background, a “story cluster” is a group of stories around a certain topic - a “meme” or summary of a blogosphere discussion. A story cluster permalink gives you a permanent URL for viewing story clusters - so if you’re following Cadillac’s hybrid motorbike or Fred Wilson’s views on Triangulation, you can follow that story today, tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now - whenever, not just when its still on the front page.

To get to a cluster’s permalink, just look for the “PERMALINK THIS CLUSTER” link at the top of each cluster.

So - enjoy!

plasticbasket, sunmeme, techwatching wheelscore

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Experiments in Corporate Intelligence: SunMeme

Sun Microsystems is if not unique then at least rare in the robustness of its internal blogging community, and the willingness of the corporate legal department to make that community public. Indeed, Sun has almost 5000 publicly readable blogs - from the CEO to the developers in the trenches, from all around the world.

I think its great - I’ve been a long term advocate of internal blogging and the knowledge sharing and growth spurs. There’s more though: a corporate blog community as robust as Sun’s presents a great opportunity for aggregation and memetic analysis: so, I copied and pasted TechWatching onto SunMeme.com and pointed the system to Sun’s blogosphere and let it off its leash.

So far its tracking 683 Sun blogs, of which its actively processing stories from the 182 most active. From what I can tell, it starting to produce some good output - story clusters building around the new UltraSparc processor, for instance, or a NetBeans talk that took place in SecondLife.

There are challenges in tackling the Sun blogosphere too, however; keyword analysis is difficult as some keywords (”java”) are omnipresent, and can’t be used to link together stories. I’m convinced that there’s workarounds though, and the deeper SunMeme gets into the Sun blogosphere, the better the output is looking.

Anyway, enjoy. And if you work at Sun, please feel free to share your thoughts!

memetrackers, sun sunmeme

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Malaysian Sensation

Yesterday was some day. Our overnite bus down the east coast of Malaysia broke down at 5:00 AM, stranding us in the middle of nowhere. A ludicrously expensive taxi (by Malay standards: 100 ringgit = 33 USD = 2 hour cab ride) got us to the airport a comforting 10 hours early. Due to the grim nature of the town hosting the said airport, and the presence of great food and A/C at the airport, we considered this to be a good thing. A short flight to Borneo, and here we are in Kuching.

Were staying at Singgashana Lodge - a spot I’d recommend to anyone exploring in Borneo. Best part? Free Wifi. Until you’ve backpacked asia, you have no idea how much of a treat this is. I’ve taken today (Connie’s exploring the city) to catch up on some ideas - like a “feed quality” ranking system for TechWatching - a big relief as the human overhead of sorting the 50 or so new feeds that the system identifies every is too hard to keep on top of. Predictably there’s some hurdles, but I’m hoping automated sifting of feeds will improve the focus of the front page and the quality of articles therein.

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Verified by who??! A letter to VISA.

Dear Visa,

Over the last few days I’ve spent many frustrating hours trying to book an AirAsia ticket over an hsdpa connection from a sandy tropical island. Not fun. Once the lethargic AirAsia site actually allowed me to book a ticket, the payment process was interrupted by something called “Verified by Visa” - a mysterious page at “securesite.com” that demanded that I register for the service, re-entering all of my contact info, showing my credit card details, etc. I have a few problems with this:

1. The service died halfway through my “registration” leaving me at a blank screen with nowhere to go. No idea if the transaction went through and whether I had seats booked or not. I ended phoning from the mainland to find out.
2. SecureSite.com?? I don’t know securesite.com from a hole in the ground. From my standpoint, all I’ve done is given yet another third party site all of my credit card details. Oh - I should trust it because there are Visa jpgs all over the place? Perhaps not.
3. I can just imagine the dismal marketing meeting the resulted in the decision to use “securesite.com.”
4. There’s no way to opt out of securesite.com or the Verified by Visa program that I could see.

So, in a nutshell, Visa’s program to make me feel safe (a) killed my transaction, (b) did so in a way that required phone calls to fix, and (c) made me feel less secure by dumping all of my info to yet another site that I don’t trust. Dear Visa: Please shut down the program until its ready for public use.

security visa

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State of the Web: Bangladesh

I recently spent six weeks volunteering in the depths of rural Bangladesh. During that time, I lived in a town of 50,000 people (Rayenda) – of which about 30% had electricity (which went out for hours at a time, several times a day), few had running water, nobody had a landline, and the only car in the town was owned by a western NGO. I counted a total of 5 computers in the town, and not many more televisions or radios.

The only technological shining star in Bangladesh is the cellphone. While penetration is still relatively low, probably 15 – 20% of the people in rural Bangladesh had cellphones (a somewhat higher proportion in urban areas). Inexpensive Nokia phones are if not affordable, at least within reach for many of the poor via installment plans. Airtime and text messages are ridiculously cheap too: fractions of a cent. Its the archetypal leapfrog example: towns and people who’ve never had access to communications beyond word of mouth now have access to a cutting edge GSM cell network.

Shocking fact: cell coverage in Bangladesh is 100% - the laser-flat topography and ubiquitous towers mean that you can talk and text literally anywhere in the country, however ridiculously remote it may seem. Another interesting thing is that a cottage industry of charging stations has sprung up in villages with electricity or generators, allowing people from un-electrified areas to sit and enjoy tea or dinner while their phone is charged.

Through-out the country there is little knowledge of the web, and even less reason to acquire such knowledge. In rural areas, cellphones are the sum total of electronic interaction for the average person. Most people had not heard of the internet or email (or ATM’s, modern banking infrastructure, or any of the electronic services we take for granted), and the few who had had only sporadic and slow access. In urban areas awareness of the net/email/etc. was much higher, but access is limited. Because no Bangladeshi services (airlines, newspapers, banks, anything) have online components, there’s little reason to make the internet a part of day-to-day life either.

For as long as I can recall the western world has been maundering on about the mobile web and the shape it will take. While some countries (Korea, Japan) have started down the path of mobile payments and entertainment (dmb, etc.), I think that it is countries like Bangladesh who will truly point the way to the next generation of online, mobile targeted services. Consider:

1. There’s no legacy systems of sunk investment to slow the purchase or development and deployment of new systems.
2. There’s no interface expectations: well we who are used to the full internet find WAP browsers and clipped pages to be a frustrating exercise, its all net new and value added to the people of Bangladesh.
3. It makes financial sense for Bangla businesses to extend themselves via mobile and skip the bricks and mortar phase entirely (banks provide a good example here).
4. There’s plenty of resources (coders) available just over the border in India to bring services into existence.
5. The economics of micropayments for mobile services make sense in Bangladesh where (a) the population is large (150M) and concentrated in a geographically limited area that takes little infrastructure to service, and (b) the people are conceptually acquainted with micropayments from the tariffs that they encounter during their day-to-day lives.

Anyway – that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a new world of millions of web users coming that will have never known the “web” - no browsers, no email, no rss – just a 1 inch Nokia screen. Who’s positioned to profit from this surge? How can you or your business be a part of it?

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Bored? Text Me in Malaysia!

Hey hey hey - if you have nothing better to do, text me! My number: 017 226 8612

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HSDPA from Malaysia

Good connection speeds on 3G wireless here in Malaysia - posting this from a sandy dinner table at a restaurant on the beach in Pulau Kapas — good times!

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