As newsgathering continues to evolve, new ways of keeping track of current events are developing. Dave Winer joins Phil and Scott to discuss how Twitter and other social networking tools are changing the way that people read and react to the news. He talks about how he followed prior major news stories and why he now has started using social networking tools as a better way.

He then discusses his work with Twitter stats and reviews what can be learned from how Twitter works. He also reviews the possible future of these tools and assesses some of the ways that information is compiled and distributed and what might be different as time goes on.

Re Barger's list playing a central role in the origins of blogging, not sure I accept that the most important thing was a list of blogs, or even a network of them. People who think the task of blogging is to pull people together miss, imho, the important thing about blogging -- that it separates people and gives each individual a place to express themselves, not subject to veto. In that way it is different from a mail list. Blogs emphasize the individual over the group.

The argument continues to this day. People who say Twitter is a conversational medium would agree with those who say Barger was the founder. I see Twitter as a publishing environment, a place to push links, a notification system. Oddly, I think Barger with his linkblog approach (which was the same as the early Scripting News or the News Page of the 24 Hours project) would agree.

By Rudolf Ammann
Presented at Hypertext 2009
30 June 2009, Torino, Italy

Working from the online archival record, this paper aims to reconstruct the emergence at Jorn Barger’s initiative of the weblog community from a predecessor known as the NewsPage Network.

www.robotwisdom.com "For readers, the Internet is an embarrassment of riches, with thousands of pages of new text t sift through daily. Thank goodness, then, for "weblogs," sites that scour the Web for interesting prose and data. What elevates Robot Wisdom above other weblogs is the catholicity of its creator, Jorn Barger, who has a healthy appetite for everything from literature to science. The result is a world defined by Barger's curiosity, in which an article about a grand plan to film all nineteen Beckett plays sits comfortably alongside a report on post-Chernbyl cleanup efforts."

"Keywords Adamstown, Pennsylvania; All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com); Architects, Architecture; Architectural salvage; Barger, Jorn; Civil Liberties, Civil Rights; Communications ABSTRACT: WEB SIGHTINGS reviews of NYC Surveillance Camera Project (www.mediaeater.com/cameras); Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus (www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus); Inside.com ( www.inside.com); The On-Line Books Page (digital.library.upenn.edu/books); Ed Donaldson Hardware Restorations (www.eddonaldson.com); All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com); Rotten Tomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com); Robot Wisdom (www.robotwisdom.com)."

But the richest people and the hundreds of thousands somewhat less rich, could not invest the money themselves. They needed intermediaries, the financial sector. Overwhelmed with such an amount of funds, and short of good opportunities to invest the capital, as well as enticed by large fees attending each transaction, the financial sector became more and more reckless, basically throwing money at anyone who would take it. Eventually, as we know, the bubble exploded.

"some economists don't think we should fix this. Some welcome high unemployment, thinking it’s the best way to get workers out of declining industries and into growth industries. They consider a period of high unemployment a way of convincing people who were previously employed "pounding nails in Nevada" to go do something else -- part of the respiration of the capitalist organism, as Josef Schumpeter said. They tend to like the fact that financial asset prices are now low, and condemn attempts to raise them as efforts to keep the feckless financiers who bought them during the boom from suffering their just punishment. Followers of this line of argument -- I call them the Marx-Mellon-Hayek-Hoover axis --tend to say things like: “What's to fix?”"

"One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days."

"At its heart is a formal Mathematica representation. Its inference engine is basically a large number of individually hand-engineered scripts for tapping into data which he and his team have spent the last several years gathering and "curating". For example, he has assembled tables of historical financial information about countries' GDP's and about companies' stock prices. In a small number of cases, he also connects via API to third party information, but mostly for realtime data such as a current stock price or current temperature. Rather than connecting to and relying on the current or future Semantic Web, Alpha computes its answers primarily from his own curated data to the extent possible; he sees Alpha as the home for almost all the information it needs, and will use to answer users' queries. "