"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."

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."

"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."

"... 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."

"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.

"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 ..."

"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."

"... 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 ..."

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."

"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."

"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."

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

"[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 ..."

"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…"

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.

"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."

"The intent of the line about 'sports-related content' is to get at the fact that we want to uphold the same editorial standards for reporting something, regardless of the medium. That is to say, that if ESPN decides not to publish news about a sports topic, that it should approach that in the same way across media. We’re clarifying and providing guidelines for how to play in this space, not fleeing from it."

"Addressing what’s wrong with Twitter isn’t going to come from thin air. It’s going to take a lot of time, development, and platform competition. Many will soon be working on this, myself included. What will fill the blank is likely to define modern news production."

"New guidelines immediately sent shockwaves around the sports world and raised questions about the ownership of one’s personal thoughts and comments and how they can be published -- via Twitter, Facebook or apparently any other digital means."

The real issue: "It’s a question of media control: top UK football clubs are tightly controlled media machines -- some are public companies -- feeding selected news and information to trusted journalists. And increasingly they want to broadcast news themselves whether online, on TV or through magazines."

An ingenious use of Twitter by horseplayers.

Frustrated stats geek motivated to build own micro-service: "It will be a system that caters to sports fans."

URL shortening using your own domain name.

Mixed reviews, ethical concerns (and be sure to check out the SI story highlights in the top right). "Think about that for a second. A spitfire NFL coach had to lecture his players, among the most macho, muscular, and ferocious athletes on the planet, about something called 'Twitter.' Hear that thumping sound below you? That's Lombardi knocking his head against the grave."

Are tweets protected by copyright? Short answer, "No." (But what about a body of tweets?)

Notes on a year of Twittering.

Mining archives through a nifty "backstory" project.

Because if you don't, your business/web site/service is invisible. [I'd add that it's not enough to have a Twitter feed or a Facebook page; your social media presence is only as engaging and responsive as the person(s) behind it.]

"But perhaps the most important factor that has made Twitter such a rich category for client software is that there is so little friction to switch between apps. There’s nothing to import or export, and zero commitment." Sense there's something here that could apply to a racing application or online service.

"It's a note-taking technology... It's a ball-point pen. Get over it." Spirited.

Practical advice for building your community or audience.

"We know all that, but we’re no longer willing to cut Amazon any slack, because we don’t trust them, and we don’t trust them because we feel like they did something bad, even though we now know, intellectually, that they didn’t actually do the bad thing we’ve come to hate them for." Or, as Andy Baio said, "Outrage has its own momentum." Or, Merlin Mann, "Problem with mob justice is the ones who're more interested in the mob than the justice." Interesting parallels to Mullins incident and reaction.

"Speed, marketing, audience-building, tweeting." True, no matter what the beat.

Beyond Twitter: "It's no secret that I'm a huge proponent of self-hosted microblogging.... Not sold on this idea? Read what I wrote earlier about the implications of ESPN running their own sports network ..." [Via Pull the Pocket.]

Exactly: "So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need 'social media marketing' after all."

"Richard Dawkins observed in The Selfish Gene that from the point of view of a gene, a living body is merely a carrier to transport it into the future. I believe we are now entering the century of the Selfish Mind." More on Twitter and being a Twit, from Roger Ebert.

Mark Cuban wants to know. I'd say yes, and that the real question concerns fair use.

Back up your tweets.

Detailed Twitter landing page. Very thorough.

Shrink and track URLs (Twitter analytics). Insert ads.

Targeted Twitter marketing.

Social media aggregator. Slick UI, not as robust as I'd like, very much beta.

A taste of what will happen with mainstream Twitter adoption.

Writers, editors, social media; what might be lost.

One click instant chat room tool.

Interesting approach for headlines, quick bits ...

"John argued that this leads at least two conclusions. First, debates over the value of internet communication services like blogs, Facebook, or Twitter can be usefully viewed as debates over how to value the texts these services generate and what constitutes the boundaries of those texts."

Twitter is simple, works like people do, transcends the web.

Add tweets to any calendar.