Twittering, liveblogging and chatting Lawrence Lessig at SXSW

Lawrence Lessig at South by Southwest. Inset magnified below.  Credit: David Sarno.

This is Twitter's third year at South by Southwest.  The first year, 2007, was its coming out party, where the newly-introduced system was adopted by partygoing technophiles here in Austin as a way to coordinate their evening activities on the fly. 

Last year, when it had a few watts of buzz behind it and a larger user base, Twitter made headlines for enabling "back channel chats"--where a few audience members would whisper to one another about the happenings onstage: this kind of silent chatter made headlines when an irate crowd--which had riled itself up via a stream of heated tweets--revolted during Sarah Lacy's keynote interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

But this year, backchannel chatting has moved to the front of the room.  Live conversations have become a primary and even officially endorsed way for audience members to participate in talks and panels.

Once the lights go down, you won't go ten seconds without seeing an eager audience member tapping a few sentences into their Twitter client via laptop, iPhone or Blackberry. It's a lot like a college classroom where everyone is taking notes.  Except the notes are public.

If you wanted to stay home from class but still enjoy a running commentary on, say, Lawrence Lessig's presentation on money, lobbying and democracy this morning, you need only have searched Twitter for the word "lessig." Dozens of twitchy-fingered participants contributed to a non-stop flow of Lessig notelets, quoting the Stanford law professor's pithiest formulations, summarizing his points, and finally tweeting in unison about the standing ovation Lessig got at the end.  (Being one of the favorite voices of the digital culture crowd, he was not playing to a tough audience--except for this guy.)

Though I counted more than 500 tweets from the hour long talk, chatting was happening in more places than Twitter, too. Sitting prominently on the stage next to Lessig was a sign advertising a live chat room on Meebo, and a group of chroniclers was collectively transcribing the presentation on the live-blogging service Scribblelive.

It's hard to know if there's a true audience for all the note-taking, or if the audience is its own audience, but one thing's for sure: By the time an old-media blogger gets back to his hotel room an hour later, ready to cough up a post about the talk (a previous version of which is available here), the event feels like old news.  The Twitter/livechat/liveblogging storm has moved on to new country, and all that's left to do is make a meta-comment on all the commenting...

--David Sarno

Attributor and Creative Commons go public with FairShare

Ever wonder how your blog's well-turned phrases ripple across the Web? Put another way, would you like to know who's cutting and pasting your best work onto their sites without giving you an ounce of credit? Attributor and Creative Commons have joined forces to help you track the dissemination of your posts and other published texts across the Internet, showing you where to find potential partners -- or to send takedown notices.

Attributor is a Silicon Valley start-up that creates digital fingerprints of published content online, then crawls the Web to find where all or part of that content is reused; Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation that helps copyright owners set less restrictive rules for the reuse of their material online. Today they announced the public launch of FairShare, which enables creators to apply Creative Commons license terms to their text-based work, then use Attributor's free service to track how that work is reused and whether the license terms are complied with. Attributor CEO Jim Pitkow said his company can tell the percentage of a text that's reused on each page, whether there's a link back to your site, whether there are advertisements on the page, the number of visitors that site receives, the number of times in the last 30 days your material has been reused on that site, and the average amount of text that's been cut and pasted. (To give you a better idea of what this looks like, keep reading after the jump.)

Surprise! Twitter still thinking about a revenue model

Apparently Twitter is so hot among news folks right now that the company doesn't even need to say anything new to make headlines.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. (Credit: Mai Le via Flickr)

TechCrunch, along with dozens of other online news sources, ran with a statement that co-founder Biz Stone made to a British trade magazine, Marketing, about Twitter charging for corporate accounts.

Stone and co-founder Evan Williams have been murmuring about the likely business model for some time now -- we and the New York Times both covered it in December.

The idea is to provide premium features to businesses that elect to sign up for premium accounts. One such feature Stone shared with us was an account verification tool, which would've come in handy recently with the Dalai Lama fiasco.

Stone never seemed to give the impression that companies would be required to pay for such accounts, but that's exactly the conclusion that some bloggers drew from today's resurfacing of the news. He put those concerns to rest in a company blog post this afternoon.

"Twitter will remain free to use by everyone -- individuals, companies, celebrities, etc.," Stone wrote. "What we're thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services."

There's no additional news on the Twitter revenue front at this point. But you can be sure we and every other tech blogger on the planet will report it as soon as it happens. And maybe even again a few months earlier.

-- Mark Milian

Dalai Lama imposter escorted from Twitter [UPDATED]

The real Dalai Lama, who does not have a Twitter account. (Photo: Christophe Simon / AFP/Getty Images)

Updated 4:43 p.m.: @OHHDL is back on Twitter, but it's now labeled as "the UNOFFICIAL Twitter page of His Holiness the Dalai Lama."

---

Some members of Twitter, the micro-blogging service, received a surprise over the weekend when they were informed that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had joined the site. "Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter," the message read. 

They bragged about it to friends, talked about spirituality and cracked jokes ("Can enlightenment be reached 140 char at a time?"). Agence-France Presse even banged out a news story about the Dalai Lama joining Twitter. By Sunday night, he (or is it He?) had attracted 13,000 new followers, an impressive number even for a guy who spiritually represents the whole Tibetan people. 

But today, as Mondays are wont to do, brought disappointment and disillusionment. Turns out the person twittering from the Dalai Lama's account, @OHHDL, was an imposter.

"Everyone who's wondering why @ohhdl was suspended. The official ohhdl in Dharamsala, India, informed us that @ohhdl is an impersonator. Sorry," wrote Caroline, a Twitter spokeswoman. The San Francisco company had been contacted by the real Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to break the news that the enlightened Twitterer was not, in fact, the Enlightened Twitterer.

Many were surprised that the account, whose archives you can read here, was fake. The fake Dalai Lama's office referred ...

LiveUniverse is very much alive, founder Brad Greenspan says

When is a start-up officially dead? When all of its employees have been laid off? When its website goes down for weeks? When the high-and-mighty tech-news site TechCrunch calls it dead?

Video-sharing site Revver and personalized home page Pageflakes, both part of Brad Greenspan's LiveUniverse collection of websites, went down on Thursday and stayed that way for more than three days. LiveUniverse.com, at the time of this writing, is still down, and callers to the phone number listed on the website can't get through. Greenspan, who was part of the company that launched MySpace, explained the Web problems in a way TechCrunch deemed too vague. So today TechCrunch declared the company dead.

I reached Greenspan this morning, and he says the West Hollywood company's heart is still a-thumpin', as are its 35 websites.

"All of the major sites are now up," he said, explaining that the problem was caused by the company moving data centers. He wouldn't reveal the new location, however, saying that he planned to issue a press release about it and didn't want to steal its thunder.

LiveUniverse last raised money in May. Greenspan says the company is "about to announce a brand-new product and partnership that will take us into a whole new area," namely next-generation social networking. The announcement will be in the next week, he said, and will involve "a very exciting technology that was announced recently." (A new technology that was announced recently... hmmm ... a tanning drug maybe?)

TechCrunch still doesn't believe that LiveUniverse is alive, however. It cites a Twitter message from a former employee saying the company was being shut down, and a few blog posts by entrepreneurs griping that LiveUniverse still owes them money.

So whom are you going to trust? The company's founder or the Interweb? These days, it seems to be getting more difficult to decide.

-- Alana Semuels

Photo: Is this monkey in Revver's offices dead or just hanging out? Credit: tv42 via Flickr

Let this be the last list of 2008 ... please

In the last three weeks, I have read more lists listing the best, worst, weirdest, most memorable, forgettable events, feuds, quotations, blunders and triumphs of men, women, criminals, movies, albums, politicians, companies, animals and things than I have read in all my previous years combined.

Are we listed out yet?

I would consider circulating a petition to end year end listing if I thought anyone would read it (it being another list, after all). And it's too late, anyway.  There are only a few hours until Jan. 1, at which point the lists magically vanish, gone for another 48 weeks into hibernation -- waiting until late in the year when the world has become just listless enough for them to strike anew.

Well with my cynic's goggles on, I see the phenomenon of prolistferation as an effective way for bloggers and news sites to score lots of easy page views. (Hey, I did one myself). All ya gotta do is come up with a conceit -- say, the awesomest rhino videos of 2008 -- Google around for an hour or so, and kaboom! Another list. 

Seriously though, aren't year end lists a relic of older, slower media, anyway? Before the Web, it was nice to get a reminder of all the things that had happened throughout the year. But there's something about the Web that keeps information and images alive for much longer. Take Jesse Jackson's untoward comment about Barack Obama, which is making all kinds of political lists. It happened six months ago, sure, but has anyone really forgotten? Getting a refresher about these things seems as unexciting as being reminded of your last visit to the airport. 

All that said, Techmeme's list of the 10 "objectively biggest tech stories of 2008" bucks the trend, eschewing individual judgment to pick its winners algorithmically. Techmeme decides which stories are hot based on how much coverage they're getting, and from whom. So if you click on its No. 1 story -- Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo -- you can see the dozens of outlets that wrote about it at the time -- a solid measure of a story's impact. Calling its list "objective" is Techmeme being tongue-in-cheeky, of course, because in popular culture, popularity means something different than importance. So just because a story was covered widely doesn't always mean it was legitimately big.

Still, it's useful to know which stories the media decides to focus on, so we can figure out which ones they decide to ignore.

-- David Sarno

Lalawag hopes to get tongues wagging about L.A. technology

It might be the final sign that the L.A. tech scene is something to be reckoned with. Months after Gawker Media laid off much of the staff of Silicon Valley news and gossip site Valleywag, an independent news and gossip site has been created in Los Angeles to focus on firings, hirings and romances in the L.A. tech scene. It's called Lalawag but has no association with Valleywag.

"There's a lot going on in this community and there's not a lot of really great coverage of it," said founder Sean Percival, whose day job is as the content director of start-up Tsavo. He and two paid staffers will do videos of events around town and even plan some events of their own.

Still, not everybody might be happy that a Valleywag-like site has made it to L.A. Who wants to have the fact that they've been laid off or too drunk at the office holiday party broadcast to people you might want to work with down the road? Percival says those people don't have to worry.

"I'm not looking to be hated, just mildly feared," he said.

Andrew Warner, founder of mixergy.com, an events website for start-ups, said L.A. tech geeks might not mind being gossiped about on a public blog. This is Hollywood, after all.

"People here are much more excited about being talked about in any way," he said. "Even if it's like the supermarket tabloids, they'll be secretly excited about it."

Valleywag's snarky tone has generated criticism over the years from people who describe it as inaccurate or sexist. One posting, for example, called Facebook's female employees "Valley foxes" and described one particularly attractive employee as "best appreciated with the mute button on."

"They're really gossipy; they don't care about people's reputations," said Adriana Gascoigne, who founded Girls in Tech, an organization to bring together women working in technology.

She remembers being asked whether she would enter a video blogging contest for Valleywag, thinking it was a contest to determine the best video blogger in Silicon Valley. She was surprised when it turned into a monthlong contest about who was the "hottest" blogger in Silicon Valley. Still, she thinks Lalawag will be a good thing for L.A. -- if it takes an approach different from Valleywag's.

"L.A. is a huge, growing digital hub," Gascoigne said. "It's important that somebody talks about it and really highlights the activity taking place."

-- Alana Semuels

Photo: Lalawag will cover the L.A. tech scene, pictured here at Twiistup. Credit: Mike Macaadan via Flickr

TechCrunch no longer honoring news embargoes

TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington is sick of waiting to blog. He issued a statement today saying he and his writers would no longer honor most news embargoes.

Companies regularly approach reporters with news under the condition that they not publish  information until a certain time. News embargoes have existed for decades among newspapers and are now common practice.

Embargoes have traditionally proved practical in circumstances when an organization plans to release complex data, which require significant analysis in order to sufficiently report about. Now, embargoes are employed for everything, including new Web start-ups and product launches, in the hopes that every blog and website pushes the button at the same time -- optimal promotion.

Arrington is fed up with playing by the rules, especially since many of his competitors don't, he writes on TechCrunch. "A year ago embargo breaks were rare, once-a-month things," he writes. "Today, nearly every embargo is broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or more."

As you might guess, whoever breaks the news first gets a huge boost, and public relations firms generally dish out ...

Study: Nearly half of world's jailed journalists come from Web

(Image via Flickr user C.P. Storm.)

More than print, TV or any other medium, online journalists are now the most-jailed category of journalists worldwide.  A study by the Committee to Protect Journalists said that the online reporters, editors and bloggers make up 45% of the 125 journalists it found behind bars, the first time the Web category has eclipsed print (42%) since the study began in 1997. 

CPJ director Joel Simon observed that without organizational support, online journalists are easier targets. "The image of the solitary blogger working at home in pajamas may be appealing, but when the knock comes on the door, they are alone and vulnerable," Simon said in a news release.

The study notes that in China, which leads the world in captive journalists, 24 of the 28 currently behind bars did their work online. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five countries on the list of journo jailers.

Read more about the report at the CPJ web site.

— David Sarno

TypePad giving blogs to down-and-out journalists

Turn that frownie upside downie.  (Thanks Flickr user suanie)

Six Apart, the company behind major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type, has launched the Journalist Bailout Program, offering to provide free blogs to out-of-work media types. If you thought blogs were already free, you're mostly right -- sites like Blogger.com, LiveJournal and WordPress have long offered instant, cookie-cutter blogs to anyone with a ... well, to anyone. 

But the "Pro"-level membership Six Apart is giving out usually costs $150 a year, and comes with enough features and customer support to allay most technical worries -- allowing the unemployed to concentrate on their real problems.

TypePad will cut you in on its ad program too. And though the program claims to feed its bloggers most of the revenue from any ads on their blogs, no one should expect to hear cash-register noises. In his announcement of the program, Six Apart's Anil Dash wrote, "While we can't promise it's going to replace having a full-time writing gig, it gets you up and running with your own site that you can start to benefit from." 

Dash didn't elaborate much on exactly how much members of this program might expect to make, but consider that the reason many writers are out of work is precisely because it's hard for media outlets to make money online. That's not going to change at the individual level.

Still, Dash's willingness to throw a lifesaver to compatriots is a friendly, forward-looking experiment. No harm can come from providing a clean, well-lighted blog to someone who could use it. And if a fresh class of experienced writers all start at the same time, who knows, maybe some collective creativity could result.  Dash wrote in a recent post that he's gotten hundreds of applications already.

"The publications [the writers are coming from] are all over the map," he explained via e-mail.  "Some are the biggest names in newspapers or online journalism and some are small alt weeklies or independents or even young folks just out of j-school."

"Frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won't be able to accept every application at first."  (One would hope this doesn't mean a partial repeal of the offer....)

So the agar is laid, and the plates are streaked, to use a microbiology metaphor.  Now let's see some culture....

— David Sarno