Well, blow me down! No sooner do I publish a column about suspicions that Facebook was de-linking incoming tweets before converting them into status updates than I find this post by Dave Winer.

I have several accounts that I use for testing Twitter apps. One of them, bullmancuso, was shut down last October. A few weeks ago I petitioned to have the account restored.

This evening I got an email from the Twitter support person BFF, who explained:

“Your account was suspended because our specialists found that your tweets were primarily links to other sites and not personal updates, a violation of Twitter Rules.”

http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311

It’s true of that account but it’s also true of the NYTimes and many other news oriented Twitter sites.

I suggest they take another look at this.

And it’s a reminder once again that we’re playing in someone else’s ballpark here, and they make the rules. This is not in any way like the Internet.

Yep. Most of the people I follow on Twitter use the service in much the same way. A proportion of their tweets are, of course, ‘personal’ updates. But an awful lot of them are pointers to interesting stuff. For us, Twitter has become a kind of selective RSS feed — and that’s its main attraction. If Twitter declares that use illegal, then we’ll just move on.

Also, Dave is right to point out that this kind of behaviour runs directly counter to the spirit of the Internet — which is a technology that is entirely agnostic about the uses to which it is put. That’s a feature of the system, not a bug: it’s what was designed into the architecture of the network. It’s part of its DNA. If the guys who run Twitter want it to enjoy the same kind of organic growth as the Net and the Web had, then they had better learn the same kind of agnosticism. Otherwise they’re screwed.

There’s another interesting aspect to this also. At the Society of Editors Conference last weekend it was noticeable that almost every ‘innovative’ use of online media by existing newspaper groups is now either built around Twitter or assumes that the service will continue more or less as it is now. If anyone’s betting the ranch on that, then they should think again.

… in 1963, JFK was assassinated,

One of the interesting side-effects of Twitter is that it liberates bloggers from one of their original duties — that of providing a set of links to interesting stuff elsewhere on the Web. That, after all, is where the genre originated — as weblogs which were just that, a list of links to other sites. In that sense, the first blogger was Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, because one of the first pages he published on CERN’s server (info.cern.ch) was a daily-updated list of other web servers.

As the web grew, and pioneers like Dave Winer began to explore what could be done with this new publishing medium, a consensus emerged that a weblog should be more than just a set of links — that there should be at least some kind of annotation or comment accompanying the links. And so Blogging was born and rapidly morphed into a literary form which uneasily mixed link-logs with heavily hyperlinked prose pieces of varying length, profundity and authority.

I started blogging in the mid-1990s because I needed a way of creating a hyperlinked notebook to keep track of my online reading and to support my academic and journalistic work. I had discovered that if one spent any amount of time on the Web then simple, browser-based bookmarking rapidly became dysfunctional. I first used a tool called AOLPress which was free and lightweight (and which, I learned much later from TB-L’s memoir, had very respectable antecedents). For the first few years, my blog was effectively private — it was hosted on my own computers and not available on the Web. This made sense at the time because it really was more like a lab notebook than a literary product: it was a way of enabling me to escape the consequences of a poor memory, especially once I’d put a search engine onto it. I knew from then on that if I’d written about it on my blog then I would always be able to retrieve it later.

Memex went public towards the end of the 1990s after I’d started to use Dave Winer’s Userland software. But going public involved an uneasy compromise. The terseness of the private blog had to be softened, somehow, by some degree of elaboration, explanation or exposition. Otherwise, readers might have no idea of what lay behind a particular link or observation. So from the moment Memex went public it’s oscillated between weblog and blog, with a strong bias towards the former. Every so often, I would post extended pieces which were more or less polished (usually the latter), but for most of the time Memex has been mainly a rushed, idiosyncratic guide to things I have found interesting, instructive or significant. In that sense it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from blogs whose posts are well-formed, carefully-crafted mini-essays: like, say, those written by the venerable Chicago firm of Becker & Posner, or by Paul Graham, Ed Felten, Clay Shirky, Diane Coyle, Martin Weller, Bill Thompson, or Sean French & Nicci Gerrard — to pick just a few names at random from my blogroll.

The great thing about social bookmarking services like del.icio.us and Twitter is that they could liberate bloggers from the weblogging side of their lives and allow them to concentrate on, well, online essays. Which of course raises the question of what is an ‘essay’. As chance would have it, this is a subject discussed by Zadie Smith in the introduction to her splendid new collection of the things, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.

As a noun, Smith observes, the word ‘essay’ has had “an unstable history, shape-shifting over the centuries in its little corner of the OED”.

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

Johnson’s definition seems to me to fit many of the longer posts one finds on the best blogs. They’re full of ideas, but not quite polished or honed: work in progress rather than finished products. As someone who has written a weekly mini-essay for (print) publication in a national magazine or newspaper for 50 weeks a year since 1982, I’m often struck by the differences between my Observer column and what I post here. In part, this is a response to the constraints laid upon one by a print publication; although my column is published (and widely read) online, its most important parameter — length — is set by the requirements of the page on which it sits in the print edition of the newspaper. So when I sit down to write a column, I know that whatever I have to say has to be fitted into 800 words.

Such a limitation makes no sense on the Web, where space is, in theory, infinite. But in fact the discipline imposed by the 800-word limit seems to me to be a beneficial thing. For one thing, it discourages prolixity and encourages brevity. As someone who agrees with Wittgenstein’s dictum that “if a thing can be said then it can be said simply clearly”* I rather like that.

An 800-word limit has other benefits too. It reminds one, for example, that readers’ time is precious and that one shouldn’t waste it. Space may be abundant on the Web, but attention is an increasingly scarce resource in this networked world. As Herbert Simon put it:

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes, What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Simon wrote that in 1971, long before the Web was created and just when the Arpanet was getting into its stride, but it seems spot-on for today’s circumstances.

The other difference between writing for print and writing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘finished’ and dispatched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a sense, a blog post is never ‘finished’; there’s always the possible of ongoing revision in the light of comments, or second thoughts, or sheer, unreasoning loss of nerve. You could say, therefore, that writing for print is like sculpting in stone, whereas writing for a blog is like sculpting in jelly that hasn’t quite set.

So kindly stand aside while I pour…

*FOOTNOTE: Shortly after this was posted, my learned colleague, Doug Clow, corrected the Wittgenstein quote.

I’ve always thought that Peter Drucker is the only writer one could legitimately call a “management guru” (though Charles Handy runs him close). So it’s nice to come on this essay in the current edition of the Economist. Excerpt:

The world’s great business schools have replaced Oxbridge as the nurseries of the global elite. The management-consulting industry will earn revenues of $300 billion this year. Management books regularly top the bestseller lists. Management gurus can command $60,000 a speech.

Yet the practitioners of this great industry continue to suffer from a severe case of status anxiety. This is partly because the management business has always been prey to fads and fraudsters. But it is also because the respectable end of the business seems to lack what Yorkshire folk call “bottom”. Consultants and business-school professors are forever discovering great ideas, like re-engineering, that turn to dust, and wonderful companies, like Enron, that burst into flames.

Peter Drucker is the perfect antidote to such anxiety. He was a genuine intellectual who, during his early years, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. He illustrated his arguments with examples from medieval history or 18th-century English literature. He remained at the top of his game for more than 60 years, advising generations of bosses and avoiding being ensnared by fashion. He constantly tried to relate the day-to-day challenges of business to huge social and economic trends such as the rise of “knowledge workers” and the resurgence of Asia.

But Drucker was more than just an antidote to status anxiety. He was also an apostle for management. He argued that management is one of the most important engines of human progress: “the organ that converts a mob into an organisation and human effort into performance”.

From The Onion.

LOS ANGELES—As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan, heroin addicts across the nation called on President Obama Monday to stick with the current U.S. policy, which has flooded the world market with low-price narcotics. “There’s no need to change nothing, Joe Biden,” said addict Reginald ‘Bones’ Dillow, who, when conscious, is an outspoken proponent of the U.S. military strategy that has resulted in a nearly 40-fold increase in Afghan opium production since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. “Everything is so cheap—it’s all totally fine like it is, right? Over there, I mean. Why would you want to…do the…[garbled].” Obama is reportedly looking into economic incentives that would both persuade poor Afghans to cease opium cultivation and benefit chemically dependent Americans, the most promising of which involves constructing facilities in the war-torn country for the manufacture of methadone.

From David Isenberg’s classic essay — “The Rise of the Stupid Network”…

Former Shell Group Planning Head, Arie deGeus, in his master work, The Living Company (Harvard, Boston, 1997), examined thousands of companies to try to discover what it takes to adapt to changing conditions. He found that the life expectancy of the average company was only 40 years – this means that telephone company culture is in advanced old age. De Geus also studied 27 companies that had been able to survive over 100 years. He concluded that managing for longevity – to maximize the chances that a company will adapt to changes in the business climate – is very different than managing for profit. For example, in the former, employees are part of a larger, cohesive whole, a work community. In the latter, employees are ‘resources’ to be deployed or downsized as business dictates.

This is interesting in the context of the Google Book Agreement, the responsibilities of academic libraries in the area of digital preservation and curation and the Arcadia Project. When people say to me (about digitisation) “Why not let Google [rather than, say, the University Library] do it?” I ask them to name commercial companies that have been around for 800 years.

If, like me, you are puzzled about why apparently sensible people are seduced by the glib half-truths peddled by Levitt and Dubner in Freakonomics and, now, Superfreakonomics then a quick read of Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker review will serve as a useful antidote.

In their chapter on climate change, the two Chicago chancers make great play with Victorian predictions about how our major cities would be buried in horseshit. You know the stuff: New York had 150,000 horses in 1880, each of them producing 22 lbs of ordure a day; people predicted that by 1930 horseshit in the city would be three stories high. Same story for London, etc. etc. But technology, in the form of electric power and the internal combustion engine came to our rescue. So — they cheerily maintain – the same thing will happen with climate change.

Levitt and Dubner maintain, in their breezy knowall style, that the global warming threat has been exaggerated and that there is uncertainty about how exactly the earth will respond to rising levels of carbon dioxide. And, just as with horse manure, solutions are bound to present themselves. “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined”.

Although they clearly know little about technology, the two lads are keen advocates of it. Well, certain kinds of technology anyway. They have no time for boring old stuff like wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels which are are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth because they’re aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is “the wrong goal”. Cutting back is difficult and annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? What we really need, they think, is ways of “re-engineering” the planet.

Er, how, exactly? Well, how about a huge fleet of fibreglass ships equipped with machines that would increase cloud cover over the oceans? Or a vast network of tubes for sucking cold water from the depths of the ocean? (I am not making this up.) Best of all, they say, why not mimic the climactic effect of volcanic eruptions? All that is needed is a way of pumping vast quantities of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. This could be done by sending up an 18-mile-long hose. “For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better”.

Eh? In her review, Elizabeth Kolbert refers to Raymond Pierrehumbert’s wonderful ‘open letter’ to Levitt that was published in the RealClimate blog. This says, in part:

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. I will take Nathan Myhrvold’s claim about solar cells, which you quoted prominently in your book, as an example.

Pierrehumbert then does a scarifying dissection of Myhrvold’s nutty arithmetic, which is interesting not just because it shows how a supposedly-clever ex-Microsoft guru can make a complete fool of himself, but also because it shows how Levitt — who, after all, makes the claim that his statistical ingenuity makes him more insightful than the rest of us — can’t do arithmetic either.

Pierrehumbert, like Levitt, holds a prestigious Chair in the University of Chicago, so connoisseurs of academic dialogue will enjoy this paragraph in the prefatory section of his ‘open letter’:

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

Amen to that. There is really only one good term for describing much of the Levitt/Dubner oeuvre: bullshit. What’s amazing — and depressing — is how many people seem to fall for it (at least if the sales figures for their books are anything to go by). What they remind me of most is those pop psychologists who make a living from giving glib keynote presentations about optical illusions to business conferences.

Look what’s just appeared in Cambridge — ye olde sweetbread shoppe, complete with glass jars full of bulls eyes etc. They serve sweets in brown paper bags, just as in William Brown’s day. Before that it was a cigar shop, and before that a gun dealer. Wonder what it’ll be next.