Threads: Follow Your Friends and Never See Them Again
My take on Threads is a lot like Amit Gawande's: Threads reminded me of why I eventually fell off the Twitter timeline. It's the same people talking about the same stuff they always do. The early adopters, the famous bloggers and podcasters. The social media celebrities. They have a bubble of their own. They talk amongst themselves as you listen. You are not part of any community -- you are watching a show. Then there are the posts that are written mainly to go viral. The memes. The questions. ... (read more)The Spam Problem on This Blog Just Disappeared
The Workbench weblog is running my own software, implemented with PHP and MySQL in higgledy-piggledy fashion over the years. I just added functionality that can hide all new comments until they are approved by a moderator. During the blogging boom there were boisterous discussions on many of the posts here, so I didn't want to gum up the works. Every comment went up immediately. These days, 99 out of 100 comments are spam. I've been manually getting rid of them after they are posted, which ... (read more)Times Responds to Roger Cohen's Mistake
I sent New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan an email yesterday describing how Roger Cohen borrowed quotes in his recent column on oversharing. She got back to me today letting me know that this editor's note was added to the column: In this column, the author suggested that he was moved to talk about over-sharing and anxiety online after he came across two comments on Twitter. In fact, both comments were taken from a Web site, overshare.com, that the writer consulted as part of his ... (read more)Times Columnist Roger Cohen Borrows Quotes
The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen engages in some ethically questionable journalism in his column Thursday about people sharing too much on Facebook and Twitter. In his commentary, Cohen shares this lament: Now I was determined to get through 2012 without doing a peevish column ... but everyone has a tipping point. Mine occurred when I came across this tweet from Claire: "Have such a volcanically deep zit laying roots in my chin that it feels like someone hit me with a right ... (read more)Andrew Breitbart Was Right About Weiner
Today, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) admitted that he sent a picture of his bulging crotch over Twitter to a female college student in Seattle and accidentally made it public. Obviously, my earlier post was completely wrong. This is my correction. At the outset, I'd like to make it clear that I have made terrible mistakes that have hurt the people I care about the most, and I'm deeply sorry. I'm deeply ashamed of my terrible judgment and actions. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused ... (read more)Weiner Story Another Breitbart Scam
Correction: Weiner story not another Breitbart scam. On Saturday evening, conservative activist Andrew Breitbart published a story suggesting that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) sent a photo on Twitter of his underwear-clad penis to a female college student in Seattle. This story, like others pushed by Breitbart in service of his right-wing agenda, appears to be factually questionable. Weiner had more than 40,000 Twitter followers at the time the alleged tweet was sent, but only one of those ... (read more)Modern Journalism is a Serious Pickle
The recent firings of Dave Weigel by the Washington Post and Octavia Nasr by CNN show that mainstream journalists, who are expected to display some personality and attitude on social media to better connect to the audience, will be fired the minute they make an important group mad. I don't envy the job of a reporter at a major media outlet pressed into blogging or tweeting for the company. Conservative journalist James Poulos sums up the predicament well: Writers now have competing pressures -- ... (read more)Meet Sarah Killen, Conan O'Brien's Favorite Twit
Since joining Twitter on Feb. 24, Conan O'Brien has amassed more than 534,000 followers and posted 10 tweets. Contractually exiled from late night television until September, O'Brien has embraced the new medium, sharing inane personal details of his life, airing petty grievances and even posting a Twitpic of how many people it takes for him to compose each tweet. Friday afternoon, O'Brien announced that he has taken his first follower: I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes ... (read more)Anil Dash is Wrong About Treehouse Clubs
In a post about how the Twitter API is becoming a de facto standard, Anil Dash derides the impulse of groups to work together to create web standards: The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that ----, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club ... (read more)Everybody's an Expert on Iran
Dave Winer on Twitter Sunday: BTW, it's lame to change your location to Tehran and your timezone to GMT +3.30. Instead, our friends at twitter.com should detect and block about 13 hours ago from web It should be against the terms of service to use the Twitter API to persecute and kill users. Yes? about 12 hours ago from web There's a lot of cringe-inducing commentary coming from American bloggers and twitterers about the situation in Iran. Although most of it is well-intentioned, the massive ... (read more)
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