This is what your stats look like when you’re first to blog an earthquake.

I just happened to be looking at twitter today when the first tweets about the DC earthquake hit. I went and quickly got the stats and info from the USGS and did a blog post about it. That landed me in the #1 slot on Google for about 20 minutes.

After I’d updated the post with all the relevant info I could find, I vegged out on my real time stats (provided by Woopra).

So in case you’re wondering what it looks like to be blitzed by a natural disaster, this is it.

Thanks to Rackspace for not rate-limiting my site during the storm.

The 17th Century Roots of Activity Streams

It occurs to me that history is written by journalists.

That seems a bit obvious now that I read it in black and white, so let me backtrack a second and explain the train of thought that lead me to that “epiphany.”

The etymology of the word “journalism,” it turns out, goes back to the fourteenth century, when the word “jurnal” was used in Anglo-French to refer to a “book of church services.” The French, sometime in the 1560s, enlarged the word to also encompass a daily record of transactions.

It wasn’t until 1600 that the word “journal” was found to be applied to personal diarists’ tome of writings.

Somehow, in the ensuing ninety years, the term “journalist” grew in it’s scope, including not only those who kept personal diaries, but “one whose work is to write or edit public journals or newspapers.”

If you haven’t read the book yet, you probably don’t recognize the style of writing in this post thus far – the style is a blatant rip off of homage to Bill Bryson. The influencing book in question is At Home: A Short History of Private Life,  a book I’ve been reading in bits and pieces over the last few months.

According to my Kindle’s progress bar, I’m about halfway through the book, and it’s taken me up to this point to grasp the utter invaluable nature of historic personal diaries to the end of understanding history. You grow up in school and colleges, and the way history, society and culture is taught, you’d think that our history books were written by, well, history book writers.

As it turns out, a great deal of our history is only known to us by the existence of personal diaries that were read for the first time sometimes hundreds of years after they were penned.

Take this example that Bryson catalogues on the origins of teatime …

In the summer of 1662, Samuel Pepys, then a rising young figure in the British Navy Office, invited his boss, Naval Commissioner Peter Pett, to dinner at his home on Seething Lane, near the Tower of London. Pepys was twenty-nine years old and presumably hoped to impress his superior. Instead, to his horror and dismay, he discovered that when his plate of sturgeon was set before him it had within it “many little worms creeping.”

Finding one’s food in an advanced state of animation was not a commonplace event even in Pepys’ day – he was truly mortified – but being at least a little uncertain about the freshness and integrity of food was a fairly usual condition. If it wasn’t rapidly decomposing from inadequate preservation, there was every chance it was colored or bulked out with some dangerous and unappealing substances.

[…]

Two years before his unhappy adventure with “many worms creeping,” Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: “And afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.” Whether he liked it or not Pepys didn’t say, which is a shame, as it is the first mention we have in English of anyone’s drinking a cup of tea.

A century and a half later, in 1812, a Scottish historian named David Macpherson, in a dry piece of work called The History of the European Commerce with India,  quoted the tea-drinking passage from Pepys’s diary. That was a very surprising thing to do because in 1812 Pepys’s diaries were supposedly still unknown. Although they resided in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and so were available for inspection, no one had ever looked into them – so it was thought – because they were written in a private code that had yet to be deciphered. How Macpherson managed to find and translate the relevant passage in six volumes of dense and secret scribblings, not to mention what gave him the inspiration to look there in the first place, are mysteries that are some distance beyond being answerable.

By chance, an Oxford scholar, the Reverend George Neville, master of Magdalen College, saw Macpherson’s passing reference to Pepys’s diaries and grew intrigued to know what else might be in them. Pepys after all had lived through momentous times – through the restoration of the monarchy, the last great plague epidemic, the Great Fire of London of 1666 – so their content was bound to be of interest.

He commissioned a clever but penurious student named John Smith to see if he could crack the code and transcribe the diaries. The work took Smith three years. The result of course was the most celebrated diary in the English language. Had Pepys not had that cup of tea, Macpherson not mentioned it in a dull history, Neville been less curious and young Smith less dogged and intelligent, the name Samuel Pepys would mean nothing to anyone but naval historians, and a very considerable part of what we know about how people lived in the second half of the seventeenth century would in fact be unknown. So it was a good thing that he had that cup of tea.

Bryson goes on to explain the evolution of British coffee drinking to tea drinking, tea drinking to teatime, and all the interesting side trails that go along with that narrative for another few chapters. My point is that Bryson’s book is rife with examples throughout history in which personal diaries played an integral role in recording what we now call history.

The Parallels to the Digital Age are Blindingly Obvious

I know what you’re thinking, and I’ll get to activity streams and social networks in a minute …

When I first started blogging here on rizzn.com, it was the mid-90’s, it wasn’t called blogging, and there wasn’t a content management system involved. It was mostly me taking a few minutes of my night to pour out some hopelessly embarrassing teenage emotional blather. It wasn’t a coordinated effort, but there were dozens of other such outpourings around the web from others at the time.

A few years later – I’m going to call it 1998 or so, without looking at my logs for exact date verification – services like Diaryland sprang up and gave host to hundreds, and later thousands, of personal online diarists.

And that was where blogging started.

If you want a history of the technology, there’s Wikipedia for that. Culturally, though, it was a symbiotic community of voyeurists and exhibitionists (and the two roles weren’t mutually exclusive).

There wasn’t journalistic intent, in the modern sense of the word.  Occasionally folks would talk about the sort of stuff that you’d find in the newspapers at the time. Several times during my efforts to write down my personal thoughts about life, I devoted entire months of entries to a single subject. For instance, I was very diligent about chronicling what happened during the Atlanta bombing in 1996 – so much so that WBAP in Dallas turned to me to bring them breaking news in the first few days after the explosion. Yahoo’s directory of news sources for the bombing listed me above CNN and NandoNet (strong competitor at the time).  More than a few times, I was able to bring them news the wires couldn’t yet provide.

I belabor this point only to drive home this: neither blogging online nor journalism itself have historically long standing associations with the “protected class of speech” we all afford it in the modern age.

What is this Protected Class You Speak Of?

In case you haven’t been reading this blog a lot lately (don’t worry, you haven’t missed much), I’ve been writing a bit about Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Any time you tie into that discussion, it isn’t long before you’re entangled into a conversation on the nature of journalism, the specifics of how they’re protected from certain forms of legal recourse, and why it is they’re protected.

How they’re protected is a fairly boring topic. The why of it is slightly less so.

The why basically comes down to the fact that journalists are the standard-bearers for free speech (something most Western nations put a premium on), and in many cases niche journalists are the only people on the planet not only qualified to write about certain topics, but afforded enough free time to do so. The unspoken assumption is that they remain unbiased, or at the very least, uncorrupted and with the interests of their intended audience on their hearts.

If you talk to Heritage Media outlets, and indeed the vast majority of New Media outlets (not to mention the FTC), the best way to accomplish this state of pristine viewpoint is to have a strong firewall in place between the editorial side of a news organization and whatever sales mechanisms exist in the company. In fact, there is no shortage of individuals who will tell you “you’re doing it wrong” unless your news organization fits this exact structure.

It doesn’t take a genius, at this point in history, to understand why that is an ultimately doomed business plan. Audiences are becoming increasingly difficult to aggregate into groups large enough to be called mainstream. This is why most of the world’s newspapers are going out of business, and it is why, eventually, radio and television will follow suit. There are very few things that the majority of the world cares about that can bring together large swaths of viewers, readers or listeners.

As the cost to create media drops closer and closer to nothing, the amount of competition for existing outlets increases at the same rate.

It’s not all about economic costs, either – it’s about attention costs.

The reason that there are more news bloggers than online diarists isn’t because it costs more to maintain a personal diary. Outside the writing class, there’s not only decreased financial incentive to maintain a personal diary online, there’s a barrier to entry in terms of the ability to write (or at least write well enough that anyone else will want to read it).

In short, the reason that all modern blogging doesn’t fit the formula of what you see on Livejournal, Xanga and Diaryland is the same reason why there are more users on the Internet today than the age when these services were the dominant forms of user-generated content: it takes a certain kind of person to write (just as it takes a certain type of nerd to want to use the Internet in the 1990’s).

That’s why we have services like Twitter and Facebook. You’ll never see a product like Livejournal achieve the levels of mass adoption Facebook has – there simply aren’t that many people in the world who want to read Twilight fanfiction, let alone write it.

Conversely, everyone in the world is willing to chronicle their life, even if they have an audience of two or three at best, so long as the process is painless from an attention standpoint. It costs me virtually nothing to snap photos of my boys opening their presents on Christmas morning – and then either immediately or at a later time upload them to Facebook or Twitter. It costs me nothing to talk about the quality of the meal I just consumed, assuming I’ve got access to a smartphone while I’m feeling sated (or ill, depending on how “animated” my meal was).

We’re all journalists now…

… whether we like it or not.

But where does that leave us?

I started off by saying that “history is written by journalists.” Here is the sub-text of my epiphany:

• Journalism, in its modern form, is a new concept by historical standards.
• Journalism, in its modern form, is dying. I don’t mean newspapers, TV, blogs, or any other media type specifically – I’m referring to modern, protected class, capital-J Journalism..
• Journalism may go back to, within the next decade or two, being the word we use to describe personal diarists. Or maybe it won’t – but we’ll certainly be getting our journalism from personal diarists more than what we now call journalists.
• In the near term evolution of New Media, human curation will be the next most important role in “Capital-J Journalism,” during the expansion of the activity stream “writing class.” Human curation will be defined as folks who can look at the mess which is activity streams and not only discern what is signal, but find the right audience to deliver that signal to.
• In the long term evolution of New Media, machine curation will take over, and the human curators will be mathematicians and computer scientists (because, at least for now, algorithms don’t write themselves).

I initially imagined this to be a 500 word post that I’d shoot off in the middle of the night – and now it’s become something substantially more. My initial goal was to share a thought I had and elicit some thoughts from folks who might care. The more I write out this post, the harder I’m finding it to not talk about the work we’re doing internally at SiliconANGLE. It’s 4:30 in the morning, so I may as well stop before I say something that’ll have John Furrier calling me about on my day off tomorrow…

… Except I’ll say this: We’ve been working a lot in our media lab over the last few months on some really cool things (a combination of machine and human curation) but it’s led us to the same point we’ve been circling since John and I started writing at SiliconANGLE.

That point is this: both he and I agreed in the first few weeks of the company’s existence that it’s impossible to get a truly valid valuation from the current marketplace that exists for monetizing content. We set out to find our own path for monetization, and over the course of 2010, we found it.

Some folks may say we’re doing it wrong (most of those types of folks either work for or have their roots in Heritage Media). I think we’re not only doing it right, but we’re doing it the only way that’ll be viable fifty years from now.

Perhaps SiliconANGLE will amass a truly mainstream audience – or perhaps it won’t. The business model we’ve built doesn’t need a mainstream audience – the business model we’ve built simply relies on reaching the right audience. That we’re still in business proves that we know how to do that.

I’ve always known, throughout it all, that activity streams are the future of journalism. It’s just nice to see some historical validation for that.

This is Why Techcrunch Publishes Your Stolen Documents, Twitter

[Warning: this is even more stream of conscious writing than I’m used to putting even on rizzn.com. Feel free to respond, but please keep the Steve Gillmor comparisons to a minimum. –mrh]

If I had the time, I’d re-write the 3000 word post that my computer ate last weekend about the stupid crap that Twitter is doing right now.

As it stands, I have to express irritation about something (yeah, big surprise – Rizzn is irritated about something).

Twitter’s communication abilities really suck, to the point where people are always trying to figure out the hidden meaning of founder, investor and employee’s offhand comments. 

I’ve talked about this at great length before, and I’m not talking about the communication platform itself sucking – I’m talking about the corporate communications of the company.  For a company built around a communications platform (and founded by people who’ve been building communications platforms their whole lives), this is surprising to those who haven’t read between the lines.

As I’ve said before, though, everyone involved with the ground floor idea of Twitter accidentally fell into success at every turn.

At some point, though, as a pundit who writes about this space, you must stop giving this company that you love a pass on everything and call them to the carpet. Twitter is a happy accident by the same folks that brought you Blogger and Odeo. Yes, Odeo. Remember them? Very few people do.  It was an early entrant in the very small (and some say still nascent) field of podcasting. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it was supposed to do, but most people you ask say it was supposed to be some sort of directory service cataloging podcasts. Do I honestly believe that Jack, Biz and Ev actually understood what Twitter was when the first started seeing adoption take off? Not at all.  I’m not really sure that they have any real understanding of technology, sociology or business in general, after having seen them flounder consistently since 2006 in all areas.

Very simply put, everything that “hippie-coder” Dave Winer has ever said about Twitter was proven right this weekend when Twitter made their announcements about third party clients. They’re making the transition from platform to service, and giving a giant middle finger to all Twitter platform developers.

Simply put, they’ve proven that they’re not responsible enough to handle the duties of being the Internet’s “central nervous system.”

Here’s What I Want

I want it to be open and free (as in speech, not beer).

That’s why I’m installing a StatusNet server (join me in that endeavor). That’s why I continue to use BuddyPress + WPMU for the SiliconANGLE community (despite various problems). That’s why I’m an advocate of Buzz. What do they have in common? A commitment to ActivityStrea.ms, an open standard that promises to free up the real time web, and wrest control away from Twitter and Facebook.

It’s important. And if you develop anything in the Twitter / Facebook ecosystem, you’re a fool if you don’t find a way to use these tools and standards to take ownership of your ecosystem.

Back to that Communications Problem

(or is it a lack of intelligence and planning?)

This whole blow up could have been avoided (the blow up of the development community, not me) if Twitter had figured out a way to communicate better.  Instead, the development community is trying to read the tea leaves in Alex Payne’s tweets and Fred Davis’s blog posts.

That’s no way to run a company.

The real question, for those of us following this sordid saga closely: are the folks in charge of Twitter really bad at communication, or do they really have no freakin’ clue as to what they’re doing?

Here’s a follow up question that I know would have been posted to the comments section anyway: Why can’t it be both?

Rob Diana and Louis Gray have been running interference for Twitter since this weekend, for some reason. Louis seems to have been running interference even longer (come to think of it), with his beginning-of-the-year prediction that Twitter wouldn’t see a fail whale this year. Every time a device I have fails to connect to Twitter (or there’s an Apple keynote), I have a good chuckle at that one.

I’m almost inclined to say that this whole debacle is due to the fact that they have no freakin’ clue, because they let us play biz model bingo since 2006 in the supposed interest of “keeping the community pure,” and when they finally announce the (least possible imaginative) biz model, they sandwich it between announcements and a PR cycle that’s the most negative in their company’s history.

That’s a failure to understand communication as the culmination of a figurative forty years wandering in the desert.

I guess I answered my own question.

[Update: Speaking of communication that doesn’t line up with the realities of their actions, check out the notes from @ev’s keynote at Chirp, writeup by Liz Gannes. –mrh]

The Great LBS Wars of 2010

I did a little mini-doc containing my thoughts around Location Based Social Networks (entitled “The Great LBS Wars of 2010”). Full description and post is up at SiliconANGLE.

This is a non autoplaying version of the embed, so feel free to share it around for those of you who hated the other version.

From my post at SA:

Jeff Pulver and Justin Kownacki have been advancing a conversation last week week that the germ of which started at this year’s SxSWi in Austin. In Siegler-esque headlines, the question is “What was this year’s Twitter at SxSW?”

In terms that don’t make the early adopters gag, the real question is actually: “How relevant and likely to go mainstream are the location based social networks, with emphasis on Foursquare and Gowalla?” Location-based social networks were the buzz of the conference, or at least what most people were paying attention to during the show, due to the hype from a couple of specific organizations.

After trying to pay attention to what would be 2009’s Twitter and coming away somewhat disappointed, I decided to just keep an open mind, schedule tons of briefings and see what themes emerged from the conference this year.  I came away with a much different conclusion that what most did, which I’ll get into in later posts, but in terms of the “location based social networking wars,” I think the clear answer as to which one is going to end up mainstream and replacing Twitter is: none of them.

In their essence, a location based social network is simply a feature of another service, and generally isn’t something you can build up a service around that most people are going to be interested in.  Certainly, both Gowalla and Foursquare were very heavily used in Austin this year, but mostly because Austin is very much an edge case for this type of usage.

I know there are some rough edges on this video, but getting it out and it still being timely was a bit more important than it being perfect. Hope you enjoy it.

[Editor’s Note: Photo credits to Dean Terry. Some video credits to Michael Sean Wright, Chuck Reynolds, Greeblemonkey, and GamingTrend. –mrh]

Gangster? Twitter? Really?

I found this in Mike Elgin’s Raw Feed.

I’m sorry – but if you’re in a gang called Original Young Gangsters, even if you go shoot someone over what they said on Twitter, you’re neither Original nor Gangster.  You’re just young.