Twittermania

Everyone and their mother is Tweeting about the new Nielsen study. The two big headlines: Twitter is growing really fast, and it sucks as a marketing tool.

Um, was this a revelation to anyone?

Growth is obvious... Considering that the people who were skeptics in 2008 are now recruiting friends from outside the tech-and-media-audience, yeah, that seems fairly clear.

But as for marketing?

Advertising is all about eyeballs and impressions. So if you want to grow your audience, you need to put things in front of new people. Your followers aren't new people, they're people who are already interested in paying attention to you.

On the other hand, it's really good at communicating with people you know by just "throwing stuff out there," instead of having to write them directly. Last night everyone was Tweeting about the RJI flood. Everyone wants to know about that, but without Twitter, chances are whoever saw it first would not have sent a mass email out.

From a journalist perspective, I think having @komunews Tweet what's on the upcoming show is a great idea. But that's something you do as a way to communicate with your existing audience. It won't bring in new people.

The Nielsen data wasn't negative for Twitter, it just tells certain journalists/PR/marketing people that they never quite understood it to begin with.

S3, Tara, and Media Giraffe

It looks like I'm going to be teaching Tara web design. It actually sounds like fun.

I've been spending too much a lot of time playing with Amazon S3, because of Project Shoestring. It's a neat system... apparently part of Twitter's backend runs off of it.

The way I've been explaining this to people has centered around the concept that it lends you economies of scale. So if you need to host an online portfolio, it's probably not cost effective, but if your project needs to handle outrageous amounts of traffic or send very large files, it's much cheaper than dedicated hosting.

I started thinking about what this can do for journalism, and my first instinct was, well, nothing. Journalism is mostly short videos and blocks of text. It doesn't seem to need it.

But then again, maybe it doesn't have to be. There's some really interesting stuff going on with IPTV. There have been online "TV stations" like Revision3 for some time, but they used to distribute using poor quality or exclusively by BitTorrent. They've only recently been able to stream video, thanks to Flash 9 (H.264 encoded video) and specialized services like Bit Gravity and BrightCove, which aren't cheap.

But Amazon S3 is designed for services like this, and it charges based on usage, so it's possible to start a small streaming video operation with only a few advertisers.

This is happening at a time where the costs of equipment is in freefall. You can buy a decent prosumer HD camera for $600. It doesn't support XLR and it records to HDV, but it does the job.

So, hypothetically, a group of tech-savvy journalists could do broadcast style coverage and deliver high quality content via web without the startup costs of an actual broadcast station.

Would it be sustainable? Perhaps, but it's a longshot. The point is, now it's plausible, whereas ten years ago the technology to do something like this didn't even exist.

Dear Convergence,

Convergence, you need to put an end to this, immediately.

It doesn't matter how, but it's time to either clean up your act or bring it to a close.

For the last few days I've been talking to a guy who was assigned to build a custom Wordpress theme for his Convergence capstone. He bought a book, started working, and quickly ran into trouble.

So I took a look at the code, and it wasn't wrong, it was just full of little odd things. The CSS was double-spaced, there were CSS descriptors that would work if only the element they described appeared on the page.

In other words, he didn't actually know CSS, and as we went over this, he started to realizing exactly how deep in over his head he was.

This wouldn't be that bad, except it's becoming a pattern.

I don't know what Convergence is supposed to be. I don't know if they want their graduates to know how to build a website, or a Flash application, or edit video well. But whatever they think Convergence Journalists should be able to do, they should actually teach them how to do it.

Throwing people into a situation where they're expected to create a professional quality website with no prior xhtml/css experience is the equivelant of sending someone out to shoot a story for KOMU when they've never used a camera before.

To be fair, I'm self taught on everything but Avid. But that takes time, research, practice, and a couple projects that can stay far away from my portfolio.

And yes, I throw myself into these positions all the time, but not without scoping them out first, and certainly not on any sort of deadline. The difference is I do it to myself, knowing exactly how involved the subject is and having plausible goals. These convergence people almost never have any idea what they're getting into.

A few months ago I met with a group of people working for KBIA with a nearly indentical problem. One girl was learning HTML from a book for the first time while she was supposed to be building them a new site from scratch.

Tonight a girl came into KOMU with a camera full of pictures to use in a Flash map. She's never used Flash before. I don't know how this is supposed to work.

The program has gone along for years banking on the idea that "look, we're new, and we're not sure what we are yet." But how many classes will be allowed to graduate who are supposed to be experts in online media, and no virtually nothing about how to make online media.

This isn't print or broadcast, where having some new media skills is an asset. New media is supposed to be their thing.

Under normal conditions, I'd write off my observations as, well, being me. We'll call this the iMovie effect. I think iMovie is the Ford Pinto of video editing software, but even I have to admit it does make it possible for people to edit video without spending any time learning how to do anything.

The problem is, almost everyone I've ever met in convergence has the exact same complaint.

[EDIT] Apparently this starting happening after a certain semester. Or people tend to be more critical of the whole program while they're in the middle of a crisis. [/EDIT]

That's telling.

- Jason