Robert Paterson's Weblog

My 5 minutes of fame

I am in an article today in the Christian Science Monitor  with Andy Carvin talking about the power of Twitter - today the CSM - tomorrow the World!

Twitter and the Death of AP - The Birth of Global NPR?

@robpatrob: btw, sometime commented to me that my some of my Super Tuesday tweets came out faster than the election calls made on air...

Wow, Kristine at pbwiki saw my little tweet earlier and sent me an email about it!  that's cool.

calanan: @robpatrob the MR news actually popped up first on the BPP RSS feed (almost half an hour ago)!

News Services like AP were born from necessity. How were local newspapers going to get national and global coverage when they could never afford to have reporters all over the world.

How could NPR and the Public radio system have much better national and global news and have it for free?

Over the last 2 weeks, Twitter has been popping up as an answer.

Andy Carvin now has 1,000 followers. I have only 100 (Yup just a reject) but even I am hearing breaking news first on Twitter. Bryant Park scooped the world on Mitt Romney today using Twitter. Yes a morning show in New York - hours after it was off the air scooped the world.

Andy has set up an aggregator for BPP. So here is the idea.

Have an Andy in every Public radio newsroom set up their own Twitter account and have them dig deep into their own broadcast area - link all of these into a Supra NPR Twitter Network. Now you have the US covered. Not a mouse could sneeze without a Twitter Stringer. Tornado coming to your town - real time Twittering. Plane crash in your state - witness Twitters. Big fire as a few weks ago in Vegas - a witness Twitters.

But this is not just the US - NPR on behalf of the system could invite people in from all over the world to become an NPR Twitter Stringer - there could be supporting social software - mashups - prizes like a week in DC with the gang - dinner with NPR hosts.

Even in its embryonic state - us early adopters are getting the news first on Twitter. We also get color commentary - Andy has been great on the primaries as other have been on other events. There is something special about the immediacy - imagine this:

"My god - a tornado is coming down the street diving for the basement"

"I am down here - the noise is terrifying - Am I going to die"

"God the house is coming apart"

"It's moving on - I am ok I think"

"I'm alive!"

"Going up the steps there is no house above me" and so on

Would this not be electrifying? How about this?

"What a rally it has been - crowds crushing Benazir's car"

"She is standing up in the moon roof - the crowd is going mad"

"O My God!"

"O no!"

"Min"

"OMG she's been shot and a bomb.."

"I think I am Ok"

"I can't see her - she has fallen into the car".......

This is a new kind of news - much like the memorable coverage of the landing of the Hindenberg "Oh the humanity!"

So what do you think? Wouldn't this be cool? Takes the idea of Citizen Journalism up a notch or two. Uses the value of the brand of NPR and Public Radio to attract the stringer. Binds the group into the future of the system. Costs practically nothing.

The Twitter Bowl

While most just watched the game. While most just watched the ads. Some did a lot more and Twitter and a smart guy called Jeremiah was at the heart of this epoch setting experiment. What happened?

How will large organizations adopt Twitter

Jevon asks some important questions - How will Twitter be adopted and how will it work in a large conventional organization?

Maybe the key for enterprise adoption is that the big guy has to take the lead.

Many years ago I was responsible for the introduction of email into the investment bank at CIBC - yes I am that old. Launch day was about 10 days away and I was in Paul Cantor's office with the briefing. All the technical issues had been nailed. What worried Paul was adoption.

This was the time when "Real Men" did not type and what few senior women there were did not type either as they feared being seen as secretaries. All managers had secretaries who looked after all correspondence. So there was a huge technical and cultural barrier to email.

Then Paul had an inspired idea. He called in his secretary and dictated a memo that went some thing like this:

"Next Monday our new email system will go live. So this is the last memo that you will receive from me like this. After Monday I will communicate exclusively using email

Of course it is entirely up to you if you wish to choose to still be in contact with me"

Oh it was so funny seeing the old guys pecking away at their key boards in the weeks that followed.

So if the big guy and a few colleagues in an enterprise were to make the commitment to Twitter it would get adopted very quickly I think

Twitter - a small big thing

I was hanging out with Tom Mandel yesterday - we had been introduced via Twitter by Dina.  Our topic Twitter!

Intuitively we both feel that something important is going on. Twitter is deepening and extending a process of relationship development that transcends both time and place.  We thought that Twitter is helping us to return to a more human life.

This began with the blogosphere.

Both of us had experienced a new reality of how blogging can connect people across time and space. In my case a new realm of friendship and work has emerged as a result of the process of friendship driven by experiencing another's blog for a while. This has been a process of reverse friend building - we start with the inner person and their thoughts and feelings and if we are lucky then meet each other and experience the external package last. In the  physical world we start with the  packaging and often never get any deeper than the surface.

The result is that high levels of trust are possible.  I think I know many of my blogging friends better than my traditional friends. This trust has been put to the test and found to be reliable.

For me, these new friendships have become central to my life - it's like being an undergraduate again where I hang out all the time with my friends where we solve the problems of the world and share our lives.

A new work experience has been an important product. I get most of my work from this world and the work I enjoy the most is work that I share with these friends. My work and my heart have been brought back together.

So what about Twitter?

Blogging is hard work. Writing good material is hard labour and many of us burn out over time. Reading good material is hard work. If I have missed my daily dose of Reader for more than 3 days - I am overwhelmed and often just bin everything.

Twitter is light. James Governor hit the nail on the head today when he said that :

Twitter is like walking to school with your friends and hanging out, while reading blogs is reading their homework. 

Twitter takes very little effort to help you get connected. Why? I think because on the surface it does not demand much of either the writer or the reader. It's not Homework - it is Hanging Out.

Being lighter it allows more social space.

For instance Luis Suarez - has just entered my life as has Tom Mandel via Twitter. I thought that my "Dance card" was full. I kept having to prune my Reader list of bloggers - I just could not cope with more - but with Twitter I can. It is socially much less expensive.

Tom and I live in small rural communities. We both work alone and at home. As we talked on Skype, he had his feet up on the desk and had his dog for company. My dogs were downstairs. We were alone.

But with Twitter, we are not alone. The new reality of work is that many of us work at home. But we are humans and hence primates. I don't miss the office but I do miss the social aspects of work. Twitter provides that - especially if you use Twitteroo or Twitterific. I find it comforting to see my friends pop up with what they had for dinner or what music they are listening too. I like being able to ask a quick question and get a reply. Sorry Dina we failed your request for help on your laptop lid.

I am finding that my relationships that had been close with blogging are becoming closer very quickly with twitter.

The pane that Twitterific offers is key to me and is perhaps an aspect of this new step that will be used widely in social software. It is a window to my network - "Eyes on the Street"

Twitter builds on blogging and helps connect us again. Connects us in that most important domain of the shared human experience - the mundane.

One of the saddest jokes about modern parenting is the idea of "Quality Time" relationships are nourished nit by the annual trip to Disney but by the everyday sharing of life's little moments. Quality comes from quantity and it is the little things that in the end are the big ones. It's the accumulation of the many threads that makes up the cloth that is a shared life.

So Twitter enables us to share at very low cost the mundane details of our lives and in so doing brings even deeper levels of trust and satisfaction.

So this little app is going to be huuuuge!