Dave Grohl: Another celebrity disses Twitter
Outspoken Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has laid into Twitter, or — more accurately — the people who use it, suggesting that they are wasting their time.
“F**k Twitter! That’s the biggest waste of time. If people got their head out of their ass, they might f**king get out and accomplish something.”
Presumably, he’s hurling his insult at the stereotypical couch potato Twitter user who simply tweets about what they’ve just had for lunch, rather than the myriad of interesting people (both celebrities and not) who update their Twitter accounts with interesting and insightful words.
Funny how Grohl chose to waste his time slating a service he doesn’t like. Many people who don’t use Twitter just get on with their lives without making a big fuss in order to garner some publicity.
Wordpress.com proves why you’re always at the mercy of free blogging platforms
The news that Automattic has finally rolled out email subscriptions on WordPress.com goes to prove the point that, no matter how good a free blogging platform is, you’re always at its mercy when it comes to features.
That might sound obvious, but it’s something that’s easy for new bloggers to overlook.
While it’s wise to keep a blog simple, features such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email are near essential when it comes to marketing, because many visitors don’t know what RSS or care to learn how to use it.
If you host your own blog, it’s not a problem because you can either find a plugin to handle email subscriptions, or get Feedburner, Aweber or some other third-party service on board, because you have the ability to add custom code.
You might think I’m about to negate the arguments I raised in my “Who is Posterous good for?” post. In fact, Posterous — though socially well-connected — currently offers even less features than WordPress.com, though it’s arguably a lot easier to publish multimedia rich content to.
I think the free blogging platforms are very good for allowing new bloggers to cut their teeth, despite the issues surrounding starting a blog without a custom domain name and then having to migrate later if the blog becomes popular (all major free blogging platforms allow you to use your own domain name, but I doubt many newbies take advantage of that).
Seeing what I consider basic functionality only just added to WordPress.com proves that, if you want total control over your blog, you do need to self-host.
And, if you’re serious about building a business from blogging, but don’t have all the technical know-how just yet, it’s still worth getting help to host your own blog, because it will be infinitely more customisable further down the line when you decide to tailor it to exactly your own needs.
Hats off to Automattic for adding this feature to WordPress.com. Just remember that you can do so much more with your own version of WordPress.
Microblogging drives mobile Internet usage
If you’re in any doubt that adding geotagging to Twitter is a good idea, the latest survey from Novarra has found that microblogging services are driving the use of the mobile Internet.
In the past year, mobile usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com — near-essential for sharing links on Twitter — has leapt by 1,068%, while page views of Twitter grew by 3,500% in the first half of 2009.
VP of marketing at Novarra, Randy Cavaiani, said that Twitter was a great viral tool for exposing consumers to new and interesting content.
These statistics are bound to be encouraging for those pushing uptake of the mobile Internet, and it’s not too surprising that Twitter is particularly popular given that interesting things generally happen when users are mobile.
Increased functionality, such as geotagging, more interesting third-party apps, and more mobile operators opening up Twitter via SMS, should propel Twitter usage even further.
Twitter geotagging: Will you be using the new service?
Do you Twitter from your mobile device while on the go, or do you tend to use the service from the comfort of your home computer?
Twitter’s recent announcement that it has added geotagging capabilities to its API means that we will soon see a number of third-party Twitter applications taking advantage of that.
Geotagging is one of the latest crazes, it seems, with many devices now containing GPS devices and making the task very easy.
Yet, while taking photos and geotagging them some time later has few privacy concerns (assuming you’ve granted permission to share the photos on a service such as Flickr), tweeting from an identifiable location raises some possible concerns.
Whereas manual tweeting means you can be a little vague about your exact location (West London, for example), broadcasting your GPS location means it’s possible for people to track where you are.
In the ideal, friendly world, this is a fantastic feature because it allows you to find your friends and other interesting people.
Without being alarmist, a slightly more sinister world may require some care to be taken. After all, unless you’ve made your Twitter account private, you could be tracked by anyone, and the fact that geotagging happens with each tweet means you can’t even delay revealing your current location.
What do you think of geotagging for tweets? Will you be using the new feature?
British Press Complaints Commission slammed for its desire to regulate blogs
The last few days has seen an interesting standoff developing between the British press regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), and the bloggers it may be seeking to regulate.
The PCC is a self-regulatory body set up and funded by a number of major newspapers and magazines published in the UK. Simply put, its purpose is to investigate complaints made against member publications on a number of grounds including accuracy, privacy, intrusion, portrayal of children, discrimination, financial journalism and the confidentiality of sources. (Read Wikipedia’s PCC entry)
On Monday, a report in the Independent newspaper suggested that the PCC’s chairman, Baroness Buscombe, would like to regulate blogs in the same way as traditional media.
In an interview with Ian Burrell, she said that “Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated”, suggesting that the public may assume that blogs are official news sources, with the blogosphere being “the new newspapers”.
It’s wrth noting that these are very early days, but nevertheless she does seem interested in having some kind of public consultation, which would involve members of mainstream press, bloggers and the general public.
As you might imagine, the mere sniff of bloggers being regulated by a body that is widely seen as biased, toothless and extremely slow to act, has not gone down well with many.
The Guardian has reported on blogger Sunny Hundal’s letter, which he is inviting other bloggers to undersign, that sets out why any official regulation is incompatible with standard blogging practice.
The full letter can be read here, but the gist is that the PCC needs to get its own house in order — with particular reference to the practices of a number of tabloid newspapers — before attempting to regulate bloggers.
To give but one recent example of bad practice, of the many that bloggers have documented in over the last few years, an article published by the Tabloid Watch blog in October, documented, in some considerable detail, the tortuous process that one of its readers had to go through in order to get the News of the World to retract a manifestly untrue and inflammatory statement by one of its regular columnists, Carole Malone.
What we find most striking about the process documented by Tabloid Watch is the extent to which the PCC actively sought to facilitate the News of the World’s efforts to avoid undertaking practices that we, as bloggers, take for granted as being standard practice in our corner of the internet: i.e. the prominent publication of an honest and open correction of a factual error on the original article in which the error, itself, was made.
Instead, as we invariably find to be standard practice amongst, particularly, tabloid newspapers; the correction and cursory apology when it was grudgingly issued after what Tabloid Watch described as ‘two months of wrangling’ – appeared in a location other than that of Malone’s column in the newspaper’s print edition and on its website on a page utterly divorced from the article to which it relates, which was removed its entirety, and in such a way that only someone searching specifically for the retraction would ever be likely to find it.
To all intents and purposes, the retraction might as well not have been issued, for all that it would be apparent to visitors to the News of World’s website that it had ever been made.
This is but one clear example of a practice that would be unacceptable amongst established bloggers and one of many that bloggers who specialise in monitoring the national press for accuracy have documented in recent years.
For a blogger to engage in such practices, which include ’stealth editing’ of articles, after publication, to avoid owning up to factual errors and removing and/or refusing to publish critical comments from readers, especially those that highlight and correct factual errors.
For an established blogger to adopt such practices would do incalculable damage to their public reputation; this being, after all, all that we have to trade on.
It’s not the first time an organisation has called for a blogging code of conduct, and it surely won’t be the last. What I find interesting, though, is the localised nature of these attempts and the apparent refusal to believe that self-regulation is possible.
We know that the blogosphere can be quite a volatile place, but the fact is that most well-known, high-profile bloggers (and a lot of out-of-the-limelight bloggers, too) do adhere to their own ethical standards, and indeed they often seem higher than those adopted by established media.
Any attempt at regulation of blogs on a country-by-country basis is going to be very difficult to enforce. Blogs, far more so than printed publications, are international, and as such are difficult to govern under any one national law.
Until such a time as governments collaborate and pass international laws that restrict what bloggers can write, any oversight from the likes of the PCC will be totally voluntary. Even then, what organisation in its right mind is going to monitor millions of blogs to ensure they meet some kind of self-imposed journalistic standards?
Bloggers generally know how to take care of their own affairs without the need for external pressures (except from their readers, of course, which is how it should be).
I’m all for open, honest, ethical blogging, but I do tend to believe the best of most bloggers and think they can sort their own standards out.
What do you think?
Twitter: How much is too much information?
Even more than blogging, Twitter seems to be the ultimate way to say exactly what you mean, sometimes without thinking about the consequences, and sometimes not caring.
Twitter has had its fair share of high-profile spats, but a recent “outrages” concerns Penelope Trunk’s twitter: “I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a f***ed-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin”.
Old news, perhaps — two months is an age in the world of Twitter — but it does still raise some interesting points about what should be shared online.
Love it or loathe it, there’s no doubt that such a tweet is a far more interesting answer to “What are you doing?” than “eating a sandwich” or “staring out of the window”.
Apart from the personal attacks many poured upon Ms Trunk, critics said that the tweet was beyond what’s considered acceptable.
Then again, this world of self-publishing, completely free from editorial control, is what independent bloggers have enjoyed for so long.
At the end of the day, if you don’t like someone’s take on life, or how they express it, you don’t have to follow them.
Is there a Twitter limit, or should we be defending people’s right to say what they like, regardless of whether it fits our own outlook?
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Twitter banned from courtroom, as it should be
Twitter may allow you to share anything and everything from anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that it’s always right to do so.
Spectators at a Georgia state coatroom have been banned from sending tweets during the course of a criminal trial.
District Judge Clay Land said that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which prohibits the “broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom”, can be extended to include the use of Twitter.
Both logically and ethically, that makes a lot of sense.
Many criminal trials are extremely sensitive, and judges have an obligation to control how both media and public are allowed to disseminate information.
What’s possibly harder is to enforce such a ruling. Short of confiscating mobile phones and other communication devices upon entering a courtroom, it could be quite hard to ensure that such a rule isn’t breached.
What do you think? Was the judge right to ban Twitter?
Brands need to adopt social media to prosper
Roll back a few years and the main piece of advice for companies seemed to be “get a website”.
We we told that any company that couldn’t be found online would go out of business. That’s not strictly true, of course — it depends a lot on the business — but what is happening is that the stakes are being raised.
Now, it’s not enough to have a website. You need a social media presence and a strategy to drive it.
With Google and Bing incorporating social network data into their search results, there’s an even more compelling argument for brands to capitalise on the power of social, according to Reality Digital.
With the rise in social media comes the need for reputation management — seeing what people are saying about a company or brand and communicating positively with both fans and detractors.
Robert Proctor at Reality Digital said, “Those brands that employ brand focused social networking applications will stand to benefit from these deals hugely, as through this they not only have the benefit of heightened consumer interactivity, but they may also start to see some of the great content from their networks appearing within search engine results.”
Will Amazon Affiliate Twitter posting tool increase spam?
Amazon has introduced a new feature for its Affiliate members, making it easy to post a link to any product on the site to Twitter.
It’s another step in making it easy to promote Amazon’s products, after the introduction of cut-and-paste widgets and “link to this page” for bloggers and website owners.
Yet Twitter is already flooded with spam and promotional messages, and Amazon has just made it a whole lot easier for casual spammers to flood the service with affiliate links.
Additionally, because the links are effectively cloaked (a side effect of having a limited character count on Twitter) it’s not easy to know what will directly benefit the Twitter account holder if the link is clicked and a purchase is made.
Of course, seasoned spammers will already have automated systems in place to create and publish tweets, but now anyone can do it with just a few clicks.
I don’t deny that the service is useful. If you have a loyal Twitter following and are genuinely recommending products, and providing disclosure, then the occasional link is fine. This new tool will save you time.
Unfortunately, I can also see it adding to the stream of rubbish flowing through Twitter, and an increase in the number of account blocks I’ll be having to do on a regular basis.
What do you think?
