"The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways. That is, to improve the ability of demand to drive supply, and not to constantly goose up supply to drive demand, and failing 99.x% of the time."

"Stop writing, stop speculating, stop trying to crack a nut that’s already open. If you don’t understand why you missed it in the first place, you’re not going to understand Pinterest’s success now. If you don’t know why you didn’t 'get' it, you still won’t."

"... the social, digital world is one where the biggest media companies have a much lighter touch, and where the content creators with the broadest reach will be the ones who care the least about protecting their copyrights."

"I found that as the weeks have worn on, the verification process has become incredibly important to me. I was never trained as a journalist, although I have been working in media and journalism for many years now. In the end, I think a lot of my motivation for such rigorous fact checking comes from a simple sense of responsibility."

"The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void."

Role of social media in newsgathering: "That said, one of the things I like about Twitter is that it behaves in many ways a lot more like a newsroom than a newspaper. Rumors happen there, and then they get shot down -- no harm no foul. I think that big flagship Twitter accounts like @Reuters or @WSJ should be held to a higher standard. But for the rest of us, we’re conversing on Twitter just like we converse in real life."

"Obviously, the Epiphinator will need to slim down in order to thrive, but a careful study of history shows how impossible it is to determine whether it can return to both power and glory, or whether its demise is imminent."

How the NYT used Twitter to update election results from the field in real-time on their site.

"Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say -- as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear."

"I fundamentally believe that we are entering the next great era of the web -- The Validation Era. In this age of too much content and not enough time, the public will increasingly need to hear things validated across four interconnected media clovers that are converging across four different screens -- phones, tablets, PCs and TVs. To be successful, businesses and individuals will need to continually ensure their engagement spans the media cloverleaf."

"Twitter will increasingly be a one-to-a-few medium, with a small base of hard-core users, increasingly selective about the contents they broadcast and who they follow. In passing, this trend will further reinforce the ongoing news sites traffic concentration where about 5% of the users account for 75% of the page views."

"I think what’s really happening is a simple matter of divided attention: there are much more absorbing content experiences than independent blogs out there right now: not just Tumblr, but Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of social media, too, obviously, and they’re drawing the attention that the ‘old’ blogs once commanded. Moreover, these social networks allow people to talk directly to one another rather than in the more random method that commenting on a blog post allows; why wouldn’t you prefer to carry on a one-on-one conversation with a friend rather than hoping someone reads a comment you’ve added to a blog post, number 59 out of 159?"

"Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce. The ongoing debate about women in tech has been missing a key insight. If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the world."

"... for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated ... always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened."

"But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?"

"This development is not, in my mind, a good thing. It robs from the blogosphere much of its naturally conversational element, which has largely moved to Twitter. Back in 2004 or so, it was easy to follow debates back and forth between blogs just by clicking on links; now, it’s much harder, and professional blogs are much more likely to link to straight news stories or just break news themselves than they are to link to other bloggers. Discussions and debates on Twitter aren’t archived in the way that they were on blogs, and they’re functionally impossible to search for if you’re more than a few months away from the event."

Evan Williams: "There is some risk to the Internet becoming more closed (although it’s not really about closed). It’s that there are fewer players who own, sort of, the land. And that will have implications long term for everything."

"How do you tap into this audience? Noting trending topics in your community is a start. See what people are talking about, what’s going viral outside your social sphere. Is there a hole in your coverage in these areas of interest? Fix it. Try sending tweets late in the evening, when a whole other 'nightside' conversation really seems to ramp up (keep in mind, a lot of people of all ages and races tend to be online late). And again, meet people in real life. It’s crucial."

Simple advice for beginners and the uncertain.

"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned."

"Now, you can choose to take my side, The Association’s side, or neither (looking it over, I think I’m with Narwhal), but that’s not the point. The point is that this not a discussion, an argument, or an example of rhetoric. It sounds like two media-educated book people forced to communicate via 1920′s telegrams written in the text message jargon of a contemporary 14-year-old."

"Complicating matters: Twitter, which exacerbates the demands of immediacy, blurs the line between reporting and postulating, and forces writers to chase too many bum steers. With every media company unabashedly playing the 'We Had It First!' game, reporters' salary and credibility hinges directly on how many stories they break. That entices reporters to become enslaved to certain sources (almost always agents or general managers), push transparent agendas (almost always from those same agents or GMs) and 'break' news before there's anything to officially break. It also swings the source/reporter dynamic heavily toward the source. Take care of me and I will take care of you." Also: "The third thing you need to know: In the Twitter era, we see writers repeatedly toss out nuggets of information without taking full ownership. It's my least favorite thing about Twitter (because it's wishy-washy) and one of my favorite things about Twitter ..."

"Based on my first playing with these tools it is clear that Curated.by and Storify are in the lead. They let you mix multiple media together, not just Tweets, and have good and easy-to-use drag-and-drop interfaces to let you reorder things. Who will be best? I need a few days putting them through their paces."

"The biggest shortage in journalism right now isn’t good writers, or even enlightened proprietors willing to fund investigations. It’s critical readers – journalists who can see when they’re being snowed, who can read between the lines, who can pick up information from across the blogosphere and the twittersphere and be able to judge it on its own merits rather than simply trusting the publisher."

Essential analysis on the current state of reporting and the newsroom. "The Internet, we know, is the greatest invention since the Twinkie. It allows us to publish any time, all the time. But that doesn’t mean we have to ... [s]o let’s recognize the Wheel for what it is: a choice."

"The 'What’s happening?' box obviously still sits atop the tweet stream, but it’s a bit narrower than it was previously. And you’ll notice that by default there is no “tweet” button. It’s only when you click in the text entry field that this button (and the character-count and the location information) appears. This seems to go along with what CEO Evan Williams stated earlier -- that Twitter doesn’t have to necessarily be about tweeting, it can be about exploring too." *Shift toward consumption.*

"On the new Twitter, users can now click on a Tweet, opening up additional information about the tweet in a second panel. For example, if you click the Twitter handle, the right pane will show that person’s mini-profile in the same window. In the past, clicking on the handle would open a new window, forcing users to leave the Twitter timeline. Likewise, pictures and videos will play immediately on the right side of the page, without losing your place in the stream or having to open additional tabs or browser windows."

"If I have any sincere doubt about the validity of anything I've heard, I'm not going to put it up there," King said. "I'm not going to say, 'Hey, I'm not sure if this is true or not but I just heard that Eli Manning is retiring.' I wouldn't do that. I feel like if I put something up there, people are going to believe it. And they should believe it."

A five-week social media course for journalists.

"We’re abstracting from that a vision of how social sharing and the real-time Web are going to influence the news consumption experience."

"Clearly, Google Scribe has been trained on the vast corpus of English language text that is also used for Google Translate to come up with plausible sentence fragments. Equally clearly, that means it is bound to be plucking phrases that have been written before out of the web for you, and favouring those that have been said most often. It won't come up with a crisp, resoundingly clear phrase for you, unless it has already been said many times before."

"... the truth it doesn’t matter any more. The only question is are you a good journalist or a bad journalist?"

"What Penenberg did here was slightly different. He didn’t just report the story; he defied the narrative, which gives Twitter an entirely new power in reporting news." Penenberg: http://www.fastcompany.com/1686864/ford-rollover-verdict-brian-cole-131-million-twitter

So much stupidity. See also: http://deadspin.com/5626506/ "Wise, with his years of experience and the Washington Post name behind him, has credibility. Had credibility. He's lost that for a while ..."

"As social media become more embedded in everyday society, the mismatch between the rule-based privacy that software offers and the subtler, intuitive ways that humans understand the concept will increasingly cause cultural collisions and social slips. But people will not abandon social media, nor will privacy disappear. They will simply work harder to carve out a space for privacy as they understand it and to maintain control, whether by using pseudonyms or speaking in code."

"Jockey Maylan Studart doesn't have an agent, so instead she used Facebook to help pick up her first career win at Saratoga Race Course."

Intimacy and death in the age of social media. (Also, gorgeous writing by Bolick. "It was a brave little house with a big, tumbledown barn and fields that sloped into forests beyond. The days were bright with snow, the nights forbiddingly dark.")

Yes! I've experienced the same. "Reading that line, I instantly felt Leo’s pain. When I was researching my most recent book – which mainly focuses on the events of the past three years of my life ... to remind myself of details and events that may have been missing from my more traditional notes. What I found – or rather didn’t find – shocked me. Throughout my earlier archives, I was able to find lengthy, sometimes surprisingly personal, posts – recounting the highs and lows of starting companies, making and losing friends, leaving London, beginning to travel around America and Europe… and countless other published episodes that backed up, and enhanced the contents of my private notebooks. But then, as I clicked forward through the archives to more recent years, something odd happened. At a certain point, the number of posts in each monthly archive dropped off a cliff, particularly where details of my personal life were concerned."

"The stream destroys what is most precious about a literate population: the ability to briefly stand alone outside time and social relations, to have an inner life."

"Over the next twelve months, the media industry is likely to be split between those who master the Facebook system and those who don’t. A decade or so ago, for a print publication, going on the internet was seen as the best way to rejuvenate its audience; today, as web news audiences reach a plateau, Facebook is viewed as the most potent traffic booster."

@SBJSBD We recently gathered 10 sports leaders to talk about teams and leagues using social media. Here's the conversation.

"She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, 'I am not a brand' ... Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation."

"And the real magic trick in 2010 is to put them both together. To keep the ball bounc­ing with your flow -- to main­tain that open chan­nel of communication -- while you work on some kick-ass stock in the back­ground. Sac­ri­fice nei­ther. It’s the hybrid strategy."

The trend everywhere. "Recently, though, we’ve noticed that the symptoms of this revolution have changed. The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook. News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter ... with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs."

"You Tweet, you (or more likely your Twitter app) attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced."

"The author finds that users are shifting from more traditional 'authority' methods of credibility determination, where users cede determinations to trusted third parties, to a 'reliability' approach where users seek commonalities and coherence among multiple information sources. This has led to an increased pressure for participation and openness at all levels of the internet."

"To everyone's surprise, Twitter has turned out to be less an inane lifelog of what we ate for lunch and much more a streaming list of cleverly editorialized headlines with links to the main article. For many of us, Twitter is becoming the front page of our morning newspaper. Either in perception or in practice, our reporters are becoming our friends and our friends are becoming the editors of our Twitter-based newspaper."

"What is a blog in the current context?"

Danah Boyd's SXSW keynote. Contextual integrity, control essential to users. "Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized."

Real-time social search.

Pew Internet survey: "... people use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news. And they use traditional email and other tools to swap stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means." Also, only 38% of respondents said they wanted more local news. And yet, local is so often the focus of news start-ups.

Reference matrix.

"... social media has made the problem [a lack of content strategy] more obvious (and more public) than ever before."

"... the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides." Danah Boyd on production, consumption, and flow in the networked era.

Compare any two terms used on Twitter, such as: Zenyatta (legendary, beautiful), Rachel Alexandra (fast, perfect).

It worked, this once.

"[T]hat’s always been both the beauty and downfall of Twitter. It’s incomplete without the rest of the Internet."

Handy quick comparison.

"[Comparing] the value that traffic from social sites (Twitter in this case) brings our site compared to organic traffic from Google."

"These days, it's all about who you don't know. These tools unearth potential connected influencers ..."

"Yet we can't accuse his attenuated figures of being entirely unlifelike. They are like more and more people we know. In our lifetime we are witnessing the dematerialization of the human personality, as people withdraw their attention from their bodies and surroundings and give it over to cyberspace."

"Yes, Facebook is becoming the web for millions and millions of people. As I have written before, there's already a wealth of amazing things you can do within the site without ever leaving. What's more, as I also speculated, the site giving rise to headless media companies like Zynga that don't need a web site to succeed. In short, I believe Facebook is unstoppable. They aren't just the next Google. They're the next web."

"We are all human aggregators now."

On the value of connecting and communicating with fewer people.

"What the hell was I thinking? Nothing wrong with monetizing the Twitter stream through targeted advertising? There’s everything wrong with it. And here’s why…"

Preliminary list of panels, including Future of Context, Indirect Collaboration, Process Journalism. Looks like another must-attend year.

"The round was led by Betfair, which runs a legal online gambling business for betting on horse races." (Watercolor develops sports-related social games and already offers more than 600 apps, mostly for American sports teams.) "The deal also shows that Betfair, which has 1,600 employees, is still focused on a U.S. expansion." (And that it will be aggressive in pursuing that expansion through social media and fantasy games. Contrast: Youbet's Whodoyoulike?)

Real time and now to Facebook.

"How you approach Twitter (and all other social media) going forward is up to you. Are you going to focus on nurturing lasting relationships with a few, or keep broadcasting into the void?"

Because it's not about authority, it's about now.

"With the evolution of social media ... businesses really need to think about what’s happening to their website traffic ..." Noticing similar trends emerging re: racing sites and networks.

"In preliminary results still being vetted, based on all tweets of 300,000 random users up to May 2009 (gender tracking excludes bots and ambiguous names), women make up 54 percent of Twitter users but are more likely to follow men (44 percent compared to 56 percent). Men are more likely to follow men, too (35 percent compared to 65 percent). But genders tend to tweet at the same rate." Also of interest, the geography of Facebook, MySpace.

"Wouldn’t it be a little magical if, when you signed up for a new site, it said something like, 'We notice you have a profile photo on Flickr and Twitter, would you like to use one of those or upload a new one?' ... Ident Engine that can help you do just that."

"And if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all. Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening. It’s enough to make your brain explode." The challenge for the live/real-time web.

"Hypesters, developers, investors -- all basically have now abandoned the former gold-rush. Stick a fork in it, it's done." Seems a little premature, no?

First installment of "The Realtime Chronicles."

An aspect of Twitter I very much appreciate: "Making following asymmetric is similarly freeing for social relationships."

"This is the impulse of news, it's not about hiding things until they're ready, but when you know something for a fact, you want it out there as quickly as possible. And as long as something is clearly labeled as speculation it's every bit as true as a fully vetted fact."