"Twitter is weird" ....& amazing

Twitter is weird. Some are using it to defeat dictatorships, and others are using it to tell the world what kind of sandwich they just ate.
Gail Simone

In this case, I think the weird combination of frivolous and important is what makes social media like Twitter amazingly useful in spreading information...or as Ethan Zuckerman puts it

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

........

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on – the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

...thus creating what he calls the The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.


Another way of explaining twitter...

Web 10.0!!

..and I was just getting used to web 2.0!


Click To Play

via

Thoughts:

1. One part that is interesting is where he is talking about how if you are not part of web 10.0/database web/semantic web, your information won't matter. It will not be enough to produce information, that information MUST be accessible and situated in a broader context. I think this is very interesting in relation to the current discussions in academia around scholarly communication and open access. What happens if your research is really good, but someone else's research is more readily accessible? Is academic research created to monetized or to be accessible? (Probably the answer is 'Both' but which consideration should be prioritized?)

2. Although he does not really address how DRM/intellectual property/ licenses will shape web 10.0. For example, when he talks about how the information in websites will become more transparent (it will have to be, to really be a part of the semantic web he is talking about) that assumes that the airlines (in his example) will allow it.

Right now, it seems like airlines are trying to make their information as opaque as possible. When prices for flights were more transparent, airlines had to keep their prices somewhat competitive with each other. Now, however, they seem to have embraced opaqueness in pricing as a business model- you may be able to see their official price on their website but not until you are far into he purchase do you know how much you have to pay- there are fees for each bag you check for blankets, for water, for everything.

(Tangent: opaqueness as an ethos seems to be embraced by business that are functionally monopolies, or business that are in trouble, like the airline or music industry. Monopolies don't have to worry about what people want, and business that are in trouble in a web 10.0 world (and by trouble I mean that they can't figure out how to effectively market to/get money from customers, not that customers don't want certain services))

This ties back to the issue of scholarly communication. It would certainly help users in their research if they could see (in the semantic web) how a study done in Britain in 1947 relates to a current study done in Japan in 2008, but if the content of those two studies is owned by different publishers, it will be up to the researcher to ferret out those connections, whereas in web 10.0, those connections would be made clear by the semantic web. (Right now, it does seem like a lot of users think Google or Google Scholar have created the idealized web 10.0/semantic web, in that they think something does not exist if they can't find it on Google. A point of view that Google may promote...)