Is Twitter like a spoken conversation, the kind you would have with friends and/or strangers in a bar? Or is it more like a written discussion — like online forums or chat rooms used to be in the early days of the Internet? One of the things that can make Twitter hard to define, particularly for new users, is that it can be both of those things at the same time. In some cases, the “rules” of Twitter and the expectations that people have seem to be more like the etiquette of speech, and in other cases — particularly when it comes to legal concerns around libel, etc. — it is a lot more like writing or publishing. In reality, it’s a blend of both.

Sociologist and researcher Zeynep Tufekci was one of the first people I came across who looked at this dual nature of Twitter, in a recent post about how a lot of social-media tools represent a return of sorts to an earlier “oral culture.” In Tufekci’s view, the way that services like Twitter allow us to comment and respond and converse with others in real-time is a lot more like talking than it is publishing, and therefore it represents a move away from our Western print-based culture (Andy Carvin of NPR has talked about what he does in curating news via Twitter as “preserving oral history.”

Twitter: A return to oral culture?

Tufekci noted that those who are more familiar with oral cultures — users from Eastern Europe, for example, or African-American users — often seem more comfortable with the transient nature of social media, the inability to pin things down, the fact that information is constantly changing, and so on. Those are things that we are accustomed to when we speak to others; but when we type on a computer we often revert to thinking about writing as publishing, and expect things to operate the same way they do in print: namely, that we can save content somewhere, refer to it and so on (as Megan Garber discusses in her excellent piece at the Neiman Lab).

Tufekci is not alone in making this kind of connection between online behavior and oral culture: she mentions the research of Walter Ong and his concept of “secondary orality” as it applies to media, and when I mentioned Tufekci’s post on Twitter, Nancy Baym — a friend who is a sociologist and expert in online culture — noted that there has been a fair bit of work in that area (including some she did herself). Anthropologists have also started looking at how people use Facebook and applying some of the thinking related to oral cultures and groups in order to understand how they work.

From a behavioral point of view, one of the unusual things about Twitter is that it is “asymmetric,” in the sense that you can follow people (and be followed by others) without knowing them. Facebook is a very different kind of network, because you have to approve and be approved by those you become friends with. That makes Twitter much more chaotic in a sense — since you can talk to anyone you wish — and more like a conversation with a group of people in a bar or some other public place.

The other defining factor with Twitter is that there aren’t any rules. Some conventions have emerged over time, such as the @ mention — which users developed themselves and then Twitter adopted — and the retweet. But even there, confusion reigns: if you post a message that starts with the @ symbol and someone’s Twitter name, only people who follow both of you can see that message. To get around this, some users put a period at the beginning to allow everyone to see it. Unfortunately, that “breaks” the conversation mode in a lot of Twitter clients, and so people can’t click and look at previous messages in the thread.

When print expectations meet vocal behavior

That’s a perfect example of when the conventions of print — i.e. the ability to scroll back in time and see more of a person’s tweets — clash with expectations that are more rooted in conversation (such as the ability to ignore others if they are talking about something you aren’t interested in). I’ve also had people get upset when I used their tweets in a blog post, because I think they saw their comments more as conversation, and therefore not likely to show up in print. But things change when you are having a conversation that can be read by thousands of people, most of whom you don’t know.

This confusion extends to other things as well. I’ve had people complain that I retweet too many things, the implication being that I am filling up the conversational stream with too much additional “noise” (in the early days of Twitter I had debates with others about whether retweeting was appropriate at all, and now there are different kinds of re-tweets, which makes it even more confusing). In a way, retweeting doesn’t make any sense if you think of Twitter as a conversation — we wouldn’t expect someone to constantly repeat things the person beside them just finished saying — but if you see it as an information network, retweeting items of interest for others seems like a natural thing to do.

To take another example, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham recently asked whether a retweet meant that someone endorsed the idea or statement they were retweeting. My answer was “it depends.” And when Stacey asked her followers on Twitter the same question, she got a variety of answers — some people retweet simply as a way of passing on something interesting, while others only retweet if they agree. Some like to add their own comments at the end, others at the beginning. I’ve seen the emergence of the term “MT” meaning “modified tweet,” to indicate that someone edited the original, which some users seem to think is fine and others criticize as verboten.

In the end, Twitter is unlike either speech or writing because it is a fusion of both. We are speaking, but with computer keyboards — and we are talking to thousands of people, some of whom we have never met, which simply wasn’t possible before the Internet came along. So in a very real sense, we are making the rules up as we go. Which tends to make things a lot less predictable, but also a lot more interesting.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Groupon

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• Integrating Social Media and Traditional Entertainment

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

There’s been a lot of sturm und drang recently about the lawsuit that some bloggers have launched against The Huffington Post, arguing they deserve to be compensated for their writing, despite having agreed to provide their work knowing full well they wouldn’t be paid. Many of those commenting on the issue can’t seem to understand why someone would choose to write for free, and I’ve been trying to come up with an analogy that would help. I came across a blog post about a completely unrelated topic and it hit me: Blogging for free is a lot like writing open-source software.

The post in question, which I came across on Hacker News, is by a programmer named Ollie Rattue and is entitled “Anarchism, Capitalism, Altruism: Why Do I Open Source?” It has nothing whatsoever to do with The Huffington Post, but is about the author’s experiences and releasing various software projects as open source — meaning they are free for anyone to use. He describes how he was working on a recent project and thought to himself:

I wasn’t being paid by a client. Although satisfying, the work wasn’t challenging or particularly interesting. So why was I doing it? Is this altruism at its purest or am I doing this for selfish reasons?

Rattue says he came to the conclusion that he gets a number of benefits out of creating open-source software in his free time outside his regular job, including:

• It improves the work. Though he knew the code base for a specific project, Rattue says because he was open sourcing it, “I added clear comments and references [and] by coding for someone else I actually produced a better product.” Writing for outlets such as The Huffington Post, even for free, can do the same for bloggers and authors.
• It enhances the brand. Rattue says working on open source “sends a signal to the world that you are an expert in your field… I get my work in front of more people, always putting my face and name on the product to increase my personal brand.” Writers are having to become brands as well, and many of the bloggers who wrote for The Huffington Post — including Tasini — did so to enhance their brand. Says Rattue:
  

  I like to think that someone who stumbles across my small corner of the internet would get a sense that I am committed and know my stuff based on my free apps, code, and my blog. My passion is my biggest sales tool. Open source demonstrates it.

• There’s positive feedback. Working on open source was satisfying in part because of the responses to it, Rattue says. “I like to be able to look at my buzz page and see a whole list of positive comments. I like that someone knew me at a conference and thanked me for saving them time. Open source opens you up to respect and criticism from our peers.” The exact same could be said for blogging.

The world of open-source programming is complex, with different licenses and approaches that aren’t really worth getting into (you can read more about them here if you’re interested). But in a nutshell, open-source software is designed to allow anyone to use free of charge, provided they agree not to sell it. Some licenses require that if a licensee develops a related piece of software with the code, they must release that as open source as well, but other licenses do not.

The analogy with writing for outlets like Huffington Post isn’t perfect, but it has a lot of similarities. As founder Arianna Huffington noted in her response to the Tasini lawsuit, writers for the site maintain the rights to their content; in other words, they can post it wherever they like, and make money from it in other ways if they wish. The site also doesn’t collect money from those who read this freely-submitted content, although it does make money from the ads that run alongside the content.

In a similar way, there are companies such as MySQL — which was acquired by Sun Microsystems for billion in 2008 — that are corporate entities, even though much of what they sell is based on open-source software. Red Hat has built a billion-dollar business on support and other services related to open-source software. One could argue that The Huffington Post does something similar: it produces its own content, but it also aggregates and distributes free content, and that is a value-added service.

And there will always be people who are willing to write for free — whether they are doing it on their own blogs, for Wikipedia, or for a site like The Huffington Post — just as there will always be people who are willing to create open-source software. Would it nice if everyone could get paid a handsome salary for everything they do? Sure. But one of the strengths of the web is that it allows other methods of compensation to flourish, and the HuffPo is just another example of that in action.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Lordcolus

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• How Media Companies Can Compete Online

alt='IDrive Online Backup: Don’t spend your time recovering from disaster.'
border='0' width='300' height='250'
/>

GigaOM

Best answer:

Answer by mathias h
You could use a typewriter. No, but I think Atari make a computer that was just a keyboard and a little screen for typing.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

The Boogie Board from Improv Electronics features  technology from Ohio’s Kent Displays called “Reflex LCD,” a pressure-sensitive, flexible plastic that requires zero power to retain what’s written on it and only a small watch battery to erase the screen.

According to the company’s press release:

“Because all Reflex LCDs are reflective and bi-stable, the Boogie Board tablet requires no power to generate or retain an image, and only a small amount to erase (supplied by a small watch battery, which will execute over 50,000 erase cycles).  At a retail price of $29.97 USD, the Boogie Board tablet’s cost per erase is 15 times less than the per sheet cost of paper in a comparable  steno notepad.

Written and graphic images are created with an included stylus or any other instrument that will apply the desired pressure (even a finger nail). Unlike traditional LCDs that have a poor response to pressure, the Boogie Board’s Reflex LCD is highly responsive to variable amounts of pressure. This allows different line thicknesses to be easily created (great for sketching) and provides a writing experience very similar to paper and pencil.”

That’s the key right there: “the Boogie Board’s Reflex LCD is highly responsive to variable amounts of pressure.” You’re able to write on it similarly to how you’d write on a regular sheet of paper. Now if only the company would produce a version that let you transfer what you’d written to your computer. Perhaps that’s in the pipeline.

Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet [Improv Electronics]

When writing a resume objective, there are some guidelines that you need to make sure that you follow in order to be sure that it is as strong as possible. First off, everyone should be aware of a common mistake that is made by people when creating a resume objective. This mistake is writing from their own point of view rather than that of the employer. Certainly you have goals that you wish to accomplish and needs that should be met, but when you are looking to land a job you must make sure that you write a resume objective with the employer’s point of view in mind.

Ideally, you want to demonstrate to the employer through the resume objective why you are the best person for the job. What skills and experience do you hae that adds real value to a company or organization? What causes you to stand out from another canditate? The real key when writing your resume example is to show the prospective employer how your unique skills and experience can help them.

You also need to make sure that you avoid focusing just on yourself when writing the resume objective. Certainly you wish to advance your career and meet your salary requirements, but when writing the objective section of the resume you must make sure that you keep the objective focused on what you can do for the company and not the other way around.

Also, try to make sure that your resume objective is unique. Stay away from the objectives that have been used time and time again. Show some initiative in writing a clever and unique resume objective and you may just be rewarded by receiving a call for an interview. Finally, along the same lines, avoid resume objectives that are generic. Such objecive types appear as though you don’t really care what type of job you are hired for and this is a definite turn off to potential employers.