Caffeinated Gonzo!

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an interesting piece this week on journalists the potential benefits they might see by adding Twitter to their bag of tricks.

Kirkpatrick advocates the use of Twitter for among other things: obtaining leads, interviewing and gaining feedback on stories as they are being written. Kirkpatrick and other writers for ReadWriteWeb have also used Twitter to develop a question set and to carry out a “public interview” process for some of their stories.

I find this idea very interesting, particularly the use of the “public interview” process. In my opinion, ReadWriteWeb’s writers are more apt to use this sort of process than say someone from the New York Times.

I wonder if there are any other journalists out there who have used Twitter or some other social networking / communication tool to perform a public interview for a piece top be published later? Chatting with viewers on MTV’s TRL doesn’t count.

I am curious.

Read the full story on how ReadWriteWeb uses Twitter for journalism. here.

Thanks go to Laura Fitton who’s Twitter Feed [Pistachio] pointed me in the direction of Dan Tyler’s review of Social Aggregators appearing in a browser near you this very week.  There is a lot of good information and a good comparison of several services aimed at helping you organize your online social life.  I have played around with socialthing (currently in beta)  a bit and have learned to appreciate what it is trying to accomplish so far.  I Iook forward to comparing socialthing against other offerings when I have a little more time on my hands.

While poking around webware.com I came across this handy “Newbies Guide for Twitter.”  Ever the ADD afflicted personality, I have bounced around Twitter apps and services haphazardly and given quirk, even I managed to learn something from the guide.  Thanks to By Rafe Needleman for sharing this with us.

Who knew that the U.S. State Department would embrace twitter?   I half expected NASA to get on-board but the State Department?  Maybe this Twitter thing is catching on

Have you ever wished you could now what people all over the world are thinking RIGHT now?

Through the magic of the Internet, Web 2.0, 3.0 (and infinity), it is possible to know people are thinking (err posting)  and where they live in Real Time.

Scary thought heh?

Check out these real-time mashups of Google Maps, Flickr and Twitter: (Behold!) twittervision and flickrvision.

Consider your warned that you may not always like what you see.

In the past few days I started playing around with Twitter, the short burst~a blog slash social networking tool.  I must confess that I lurked a while before I started posting.  Not being a heavy user of text messaging (my 35 yo sister annoys me with her habit) I was not sure of the appeal, but I’m trying it anyway.

I have found a couple of friends on the service so far, and I have played with it a bit, and it is sort of fun.   I have heard that Twitter can be addicting, that, for me at least remains to be seen.  Maybe when I have discovered  more friends / acquaintances / net shadows  on the service to follow, I will the itch to Twitch ~er~ Twitter.  In the mean time, I’ll experiment.

Should you feel the desire to checkup on me ~ follow wiredgonzo.

To read another take on whether or not Twitter Matters, check out this post and associated comments on the CivicMatters blog.

It’s a scientific fact that if you search long and hard enough (and scarify having an actual life enough…) the time will come when the most embarrassing moments of your childhood will come back to haunt you.

Case in point? Songs that I used to be forced to listen to back in 2nd, 3rd, and fourth grade elementary school have now found a home on the Internet, just to haunt me and frighten my children.

Witness: “It’s a Scientific Fact” by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer immortalized on their Singing Science Records LP “Space Songs” produced in the 1950s.

You can listed to “It’s a Scientific Fact” here in glorious MP3 format. For more on the Singing Science Records go here.

It’s cheesy, it’s a waste of a good three minutes and it’s on MySpace. 

MySpace’s first attempt at original video programming is a 3 minute per episode production of “Roommates” a “video blog” featuring recently graduated college girls on the prowl and starring in their own reality show.  It’s boring drivel and the only redeeming thing I think it has going for it is that it is fake. 

I am sure that it will catch on… after all this Fall’s new television line up includes a new comedy series based on the equally cheesy 30 “Caveman” second television spots by Geico.  So why not put fake Reality TV on Myspace?

I can’t wait for MySpace to introduce the first in a series of inevitable Roommates inspired ringtones.  I am sure they too will be a big hit.  I am sure it won’t be long before I can hear them being played between commecials  every time I slip and turn on the Top 40 radio station in my car. 

When compared to other industrialized nations, the United States is trudging in the slow lane when it comes to Internet connectivity. This conclusion is the gist of a study commissioned by the Communications Workers of America in Washington DC. The report on the current state of broadband Internet connectivity was released this week. Conducted with the aim of convincing the Federal Communications Commission to redefine what constitutes high speed, a standard that was set by the FCC as 200 kilobits a second, a benchmark set more than a decade ago. The median U.S. speed of 1.97megabits a second is another when compared to Japan’s 67 mbs or even Canada’s median of 7 mbs. This story was originally reported on USA Today reported June 16th, 2007 and referred to by physorg.com.

A recent post on LawBean details EFF privacy advocate/attorney Kevin Bankston’s little old version of the smoking gun.  It seems that the attorney has been caught, photographed by satellite and displayed on the Internet, not once but twice.  The first time was on Amazon’s A9 service, the second time by Google’s Streetview.

Read about it also on ZDNET.