Those who attempt to regain control of communications face outcry. Certain corners of the Internet have been erupting in argument in the past weeks following an announcement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York that it will henceforth require scientists who blog to ask the permission of presenters before firing up computers or mobile phones and publicizing their findings.
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
Monica Rankin posted a video to YouTube about how she uses Twitter in her classroom at the University of Texas. Somehow this Monday morning the video showed up on the page of the most popular bookmarks for the day on Delicious. It had only been viewed 425 times and neither Rankin nor we could figure out how it got bookmarked so much in that one random day. It's a very good video though, so we wrote a blog post about it that saw an unusually high 12,000 views within 24 hours. We decided to pay very close attention to where those readers came from, just to see what we could learn, and some unexpected trends emerged from the data.
"The smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, which is to weblogs what text messages are to email - short, to the point, and direct."