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blogging about blogging about

  • the WhiteHouse.gov blog: open government

    Among the inaugural festivities, the official web site of the White House underwent a transition of its own. The site is now built around a central blog, which is a presidential first and a definite sign of the times. The first post lays out the purpose of the blog in detail:

    Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration’s online programs will put citizens first. Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

    Communication — Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.

    Transparency — President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

    Participation — President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

    We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know.

    I think that the key here is that the WH website remains an irgan of Executive Branch government and is not just another blog in the standard, political/technology sense. The Communication role is of course obvious, but the Transparency and Participation are also key. Posting executive orders to the web site is a great start, and allowing the public to review and comment on legislation before it gets to the President’s desk is going to really open the legislative process to the public in an innovative and rigorous way.

    It’s interesting to see that a lot of technology experts don’t seem to understand the civic context of the purpose of the WH blog. For example, Dave Winer complains,

    The White House should send us to places where our minds will be nourished with new ideas, perspectives, places, points of view, things to do, ways we can make a difference. It must take risks, because that is reality — we’re all at risk now — hugely.

    I don’t advocate a blogging host like the Obama campaign website. There are already plenty of places to host blogs. But I do want the White House to be a public space, where new thinking from all over the world meets other new thinking. A flow distributor. A two-way briefing book for the people and the government.

    We need the minds of industry, education, health care, government, people from all walks of life, to connect. It doesn’t have to be whitehouse.gov, but why not, why wait?

    I think this critique is unfair – partly because by publicizing executive orders and legislation, the public minds Dave talks about will have unprecedented access to the inner workings of the executive branch. By using the blog as a central distribution point, it already is the two-way briefing book he talks about.

    What the WH site should not be, however, is a “public space”. The two-way flow needs to be of absolute highest SNR, which anyone who has spent even ten minutes online can attest is fundamentally incompatible with an open forum. The flow of information in both directions must be structured and controlled for maximum efficiency. If instead WH.gov becomes another home to the constant stream of garbage that spews over most public fora on the web, then one, the public will not be well-served by having to wade through the muck to find the information of genuine civic interest; and two, the very concept of an open and transparent portal into the inner workings of government will be discredited, and that we above all must not allow to happen. WH.gov is a courageous experiment and we must not let it fail.

    It should be noted that the official WhiteHouse YouTube channel does allow comments. Since YouTube is not a government site, there isn’t the same requirement of decorum and civic sensibility, so a free-for-all can be tolerated.

    Related – see Patrick Ruffini, Ars Technica, and TechCrunch for further comments on the WH.gov blog from a technological perspective. Also see Democracy Arsenal and Open Left for brief commentary from a political perspective. Finally, Read/Write Web has a nice 12-year retrospective on the evolution of the WH.gov website through the past several Presidencies.

  • whither NewsJunk?

    One of my mantras is to rely on others to filter my data in the social web, because the key to improving your signal to noise ratio is not to try and filter the noise, but actually to reduce your signal. That’s a lot harder than it sounds to do. But it’s made a lot easier by genuinely smart filterers like Dave Winer’s NewsJunk, which was an invaluable tool during the election season. Winer basically culled the best and most interesting news stories (by hand) and fed them to a dedicated RSS feed, which then fed into twitter. As a result I often briefed myself on the day’s politics by first checking @newsjunkies rather than wading into my mess of feeds on Google Reader cold. This is why i am genuinely sad to see that Winer is considering pulling the plug on NewsJunk now that the election has ended.

  • Backing up your tweets

    Twitter: over one billion tweets served. Actually, it’s probably more than that, since the count is from GigaTweet, an external service and not an official count. If we do the math, that comes out to:

    140 chars per tweet x 1 byte per char x 10^9 tweets = 140 billion bytes = 130.4 GB worth of data

    The 1 billion tweet mark took Twitter just over two years to achieve. Even assuming exponential growth, it’s hard to see Twitter’s raw tweet storage needs exceeding a terabyte ($109 and falling) in the next five years.

    Of course, raw storage alone isn’t the whole story, since unlike the gigabytes of data on our home computers, the data on Twitter needs to be actively accessed and queried from the databases, which is a non-trivial task (as any regular user of Twitter over the past year can attest to). This is probably why Twitter has been enforcing a limit of 3200 tweets on users’ archives. The overhead on maintaining the archives beyond that is probably a threat to Twitter’s ability to maintain uptime and service reliability. The limit seems reasonable, since only the heaviest users will have reached that limit by now – I’ve been on twitter longer than most of the A-listers, and I tweet every blog entry I make from 5-6 different blogs, but I’m still only around 1200 tweets. Also, with far fewer followers (several hundred instead of thousands), I have only a handful of @replies compared to the firehose that folks like Darren (@problogger) or Scoble (@Scobleizer) see on their real-time clients. As a result, Twitter is more akin to an email/private messaging system for users like myself, rather than a real-time chatroom for the big users.

    Still, even a casual Twitter user should be at least partially alarmed at the thought that their entire Twitter history is subject to arbitrary limits and no real guarantee of backup. As usual, it’s up to us to protect our own data, especially data in a walled garden (albeit one with handy RSS and API gates). Good user practices are the same whether we are using an online service or word processing at home, after all.

    Here are just a few ways in which you can backup your tweets. I am sure there are more, so if you have any ideas I’ve not listed here, please share in comments!

    Tweetake.com – This service lets you enter your username and download a CSV-format file of your followers, favorites, friends, and tweets. Unfortunately, @replies are not available for backup. It doesn’t save direct messages, either, but if you configure your twitter account to send you notification emails of direct messages, you can t least archive those separately. The CSV format is useful for archiving but not very user-friendly, though you could in principle import the data again into some other form.

    Alex King’s Twitter Tools – this is a wordpress plugin that lets you manage your twitter account directly from your WordPress blog. The plugin lets you blog each tweet and/or tweet each blog post, and you can also generate a daily tweet digest as a blog post if you choose (and assign it to an arbitrary category). There’s no way to archive replies, DMs, or follower relationships.

    Twitter itself supports RSS feeds, so you could slurp your own feed of replies and tweets using a feedreader and periodically back those up or even write them to disk. Also, users of third-party services like Socialthing, Friendfeed, or Ping.fm also have an alternate interface to Twitter that could potentially be used for backup. However, none of these provide comprehensive tweet archives either, only real-time mirroring.

    Finally, Dave Winer has proposed a service/API that twitter clients can use to backup the RSS feed of a twitter account, but this is more of a technical solution of interest to twitter developers rather than end users.

    UPDATE: Johann Burkard has written a great little tool in Java called (appropriately) TwitterBackup. It is a very simple piece of freeware that simply downloads all your tweets to a XML-format file saved locally. You specify a filename as you desire, and the tool is smart enough that if you give it the name of a file that already exists, it will only download newer tweets and append them to it rather than do a full download again. This incremental backup of tweets is ideal behavior – the only thing that this tool doesn’t do is preserve your follower/following relationships.

    To be honest, none of these solutions are perfect, though Tweetake and Twitter Backup come closest. What would the ideal twitter backup tool look like? A few thoughts:

    1. be available as a desktop client or Adobe AIR application rather than yet another online service asking for your twitter password. ((Twitter’s implementation of OAuth or OpenID or some other authorization system is long overdue, by the way.))
    2. At first run, it should allow you to retrieve your entire (available) twitter history, including tweets, replies, and DMs.
    3. After the initial import, it should provide for periodic incremental backups of your tweets/replies/DMs, at an interval you specify (ideally, a five minute interval minimum).
    4. It should preserve your friend/follower relationships, and let you import everyone you follow onto any new twitter account or export all their RSS feeds as an OPML file.

    What else? There’s definitely a niche out there for an enterprising developer to take Twitter’s API and create a tool focused on backup rather than yet another twitter client. Hopefully before I reach the 3200 tweet limit myself!

  • TwiTip

    Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame has launched a new blog, TwiTip, aimed at introducing Twitter to new users. Darren always has an interesting and insightful take on blogging and so I think his insights will be worth reading even if you’re a veteran twitter user. Given how much I blog about twitter I can fully understand the appeal of starting a blog devoted to it!

  • A revenue model for Twitter

    At RWW, Bernard Lunn asks readers to suggest a revenue model for Twitter, that satisfies two criteria:

    1. Do not irritate/interrupt the user and even occasionally add value to the user.

    2. Provide a value proposition that is so compelling that even conservative buyers give it a try.

    There’s actually a fairly simple solution that meets the criteria above, and it relies on a relatively new feature that Twitter introduced primarily for the 2008 presidential elections: selling ad space on topics pages. The common topics pages are candidate-specific ones like “Obama” or “Palin” but there are also new topical ones being generated such as “Muslim” or “Colin Powell“. Note that these topical pages, unlike the candidate pages, are dynamic and fade into and out of existence based on the real-time activity of twitter users, so these truly are a snapshot of current discussion rather than any kind of archive or comprehensive index. There’s even a “tag cloud” at the top of the main election page that shows what the current topics are and the topicscan be filtered by candidate (for example, “Obama and muslim“)

    These topics and candidates pages are election-centric for obvious reasons, but there’s no reason that they can’t be expanded in scope, analogous to the breadth of various topics at alltop.com. The crucial difference here however is that the content is entirely user-generated tweets rather than RSS feeds of news and blogs, and is presented as a real-time “river” of information.

    So, then, how to monetize? Simply, to imitate Google, and sell ad space on the topics pages. Twitter could even partner with Google or Yahoo and share the revenue. Imagine a partnership with google, for example: adwords purchasers would buy ads for specific keywords, and if/when those keywords become Topics at Twitter, their ads would display. Likewise, contextual ads based on the real-time river of tweets for a given topic could also scroll by in the sidebar, or appear interspersed.

    The point here is that Twitter has created instantaneous portals for the hottest topics of the day, and what makes it so useful as an end-point destination for websurfers is that the twitter users are generating the content, providing both links and commentary. So, the real estate created by these topics pages has real value for advertising, as long as it is contextual and targeted. But targeting is easy because instead of having to analyse the entire webpage (as Adsense does at present), the contextual algorithm has a head start because of the topic itself. Then the remaining contextualization can be done on the river of tweets for fine-tuning. This should ensure better relevancy and higher click-through overall.

  • Please vote for my plugin

    My plugin, AHP Sitewide Recent Posts, is an entrant in the WPMU.org plugin competition. I would greatly appreciate your support! Please cast your vote here and vote for “Yet Another Posts Plugin“. Thank you!

  • AHP Sitewide Recent Posts plugin for WordPress MU

    UPDATE: Due to seeming failure of compatibility with the latest versions of WPMU, WPMU Dev has replaced my plugin at their site with their own Recent Posts plugin, which requires their Post Indexer. There’s only an old version at WPMU.org of my plugin now. I am going to rewrite this plugin shortly.

    Related: search on AHP at premium WPMU

    Building on the venerable Recent Posts plugin by Ron and Andrea, I have created an extended version that offers a lot more user control over output, including gravatar support. The basic features are:

    • excludes posts on main blog (blog ID = 1)
    • excludes first posts (Hello, world) on user blogs (post ID = 1)
    • option to show gravatar support (24px). Gravatar links to posts by user on their blog.
    • option to show post excerpt. User can specify excerpt length with extra argument. Option to capitalize 1st five words of excerpt for readability.
    • option to show post author name
    • option to show post date
    • option to show post comment count
    • all dispay options can be selectively toggled on or off using a single bitmask parameter, permitting very flexible and customizable usage (256 possible configurations!)
    • numerous other display and formatting options can be easily edited in source code using global vars

    The argument list:

    • $how_many: how many recent posts are being displayed
    • $how_long: time frame to choose recent posts from (in days)
    • $optmask: bitmask for various display options (default: 255)
      • 1; // gravatar
      • 2; // date
      • 4; // author name
      • 8; // comment count
      • 16; // blog name
      • 32; // post name
      • 64; // post excerpt
      • 128; // excerpt capitalization
    • $exc_size: size of excerpt in words (default: 30)
    • $begin_wrap: start html code (default: <li class=”ahp_recent-posts”>)
    • $end_wrap: end html code to adapt to different themes (default: </li>)

    To use the bitmask option, simply add the numeric codes for the display options you want together. For example, suppose you only want gravatar, post name, and date – then the bitmask would be 1+2+32 = 35. Using a bitmask in this way, you can turn on or off any combination of display options above, using only a single function argument.

    The latest version of this plugin is at WPMUDEV with a more complete description, installation instructions, screenshot, and sample function call. You can see also see the plugin in action at Talk Islam, under the sidebar section titled “Recent Journals”.

    (see update)

    screenshot of AHP Recent Posts plugin for WPMU
    screenshot of AHP Recent Posts plugin for WPMU

  • Who do you follow on twitter?

    Are you on Twitter? Share some cool people to follow.

    I like Musab (@musabb) – he twitters exclusively in haiku 🙂 If you’re really into haiku on twitter, you’ll need to follow Haiku Twaiku (@haikutwaiku), but they updated a bit too often for me, I just use #haiku to get my fix as needed instead. There’s also Twitter Lit (@twitterlit), which only posts the first line of novels.

    There are some interesting “utilities” on twitter, ranging from weather (@Forecast), to do lists (@rtm), and even tracking your gas mileage (@fuelfrog).

    Twitter is also a handy source of news – you can get breaking news from CNN (@cnnbrk) or international news headlines from Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish). I also rely on News Junkies (@newsjunkies) for politics headlines and Tech Junk (@techjunk) and Read/Write Web (@rww) for tech news. I’m also a fan of China Web 2.0 Review (@cwr) and Malaysia Matters (@malaysiamatters).

    Of course, the punditocracy is well-represented as well. In politics, there’s The Politico (@ThePolitico), Joe Trippi (@JoeTrippi), Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini), Joshua Trevino (@jstrevino), and Marc Ambinder (@marcambinder). On the tech side, there’s Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer), Dave Winer (@davewiner), Mike Arrington (@techcrunch), and Michael Parekh (@MParekh). You can also follow Lawrence Lessig’s new organization, Change Congress (@change_congress).

    There are also a lot of simply interesting people and celebrities on Twitter. For example, Muhammad Saleem (@msaleem), Om Malik (@om), Felicia Day (@feliciaday), and Wil Wheaton (@wilw) (yes, that Wil Wheaton). The Mars Phoenix Lander (@MarsPhoenix) also is quite talkative.

    Finally, I confess to liking the bad guys – Darth Vader (@darthvader), Admiral Piett (@admiralpiett), and even Al Qaeda (@alqaeda) 🙂

    So, who are you following? Don’t forget to follow @azizhp – or @talkislam for that matter 🙂

  • RSS-based comment moderation?

    I just left the following ticket on WordPress Trac, as a feature request:

    RSS feeds are already generated for posts and comments by default. What would be very helpful woudl be a dedicated RSS feed for comments in the moderation queue. This would permit efficient queue processing without having to log into the Dashboard.

    For added functionality, each item in the RSS feed could have unique URL hash address links for approve, reject, and spam, so that moderating directly from the RSS feed could be possible from within the feedreading application. the RSS feed would need to be password protected or made visible to any user level that the admin desires to set.

    (Trac Ticket #7452)

  • The problem with Web2.0

    I intended to write a blog post on this topic, but ended up using Powerpoint oto t organize my thoughts, and then realized that the resulting slideshow mace the post somewhat superfluous. It is a rumination on the problem with web2.0 today (information overload), some solutions, and speculation about where we go from here:

    The Problem With Web2.0