For those of you who are in the Twitter “retweet” beta test, I have a word of advice: proceed cautiously.

Here’s why. Currently, retweets that are executed via the Twitter web “retweet link” are visible to your followers who are using the web interface to read your tweets but are not visible to popular third party clients.

Let me say that a different way: popular third party applications are currently not displaying RTs executed via the Twitter web interface “retweet” link. In other words, these retweets are MIA in a follower’s timeline in popular third-party clients. The exception: Tweetie2.

This may be a “cart before the horse” problem. In other words, third party applications may not have had a chance to integrate the new API. Or it may be that Twitter privileged Tweetie2 developers. I don’t know.

But if most of your followers read your tweets using third party desktop clients, this “bug” could have a serious impact on your personal retweet rate in the short-term. Experiment wisely. And mindfully.

The Story In Pictures

People who are part of the beta test will see a familiar-looking “alert” on their Twitter home page:

Twitter Alert Shows You Are In Beta Test

Sending A Retweet With The New Feature

Twitter has made it very easy to send a retweet via the web interface. This may be an attempt to make the web interface a more pleasant experience for people who follow a lot of accounts. Certainly, the ability to easily retweet has been a mainstay of third-party Twitter clients.

(1) Read your tweets via the web interface. When you find a tweet that seems interesting enough to share with your followers, mouse-over. You’ll see the “retweet” link to the right of the familiar “reply” link.

Twitter Retweet Link - Web Interface

(2) After you retweet, this is what the tweet looks like from your home page: it bears the avatar of the original account (instead of your avatar) and includes information about who retweeted it as a tagline. Thus, this new feature might make it easier to discover interesting people to follow.

The Result from the web: New Twitter retweet shows the originating avatar, which may not be an account you follow.

versus

Traditional Retweet: You see the avatar of person you follow who sent the RT

(3) On your profile page, the visual difference starts with an icon instead of initials (RT). Again, the Twitter ID that shows is the original author, not the person who retweeted. Note that there is an “undo” option. I haven’t tested it to see how long this “delete” feature takes.

The Difference In Appearance On Your Profile Page

(4) In addition, Twitter tells you how many other people have retweeted a specific tweet. That’s an incentive, of sorts, to use the new feature.

Twitter shows you how many others have RTed the same tweet.

Receiving A Retweet With The New Feature

If you are in the beta test, when you receive a retweet from someone else in the beta-test, you’ll see an alert when you are reading your tweets from the web. But if you aren’t reading them from the web, you won’t see those retweets in Seesmic, Tweetdeck or TwitBirdPro.

(1) If you are in the beta test, Twitter gives you a heads-up to explain why you are seeing a new avatar in your timeline. This is a smart move for the part of the Twitter community that follows a small-ish number of accounts; for them, the new avatar might be visually jarring.

Twitter Alert For New Retweet

(2) If you are not in the beta test, your retweets look exactly like they always have, in the web interface. (This is how my “new retweet” tweet looks in my kegill_uw account. Yes, I follow myself there.)

For Non-Beta Testers, No Change In Web Retweet Appearance

(3) However, the problem comes for your followers who do not use the web to read your Tweets. The Twitter-powered retweet simply falls into a black hole.

First, see the Barbara Clements retweet in context (the tweets before and after it, web interface). Then look at Seemsic, from the desktop, and Tweetdeck and TwitBirdPro, from the iPhone. Notice that the Barbara Clements retweet is MIA in all three instances.

The New Retreet In Context (Tweets Surrounding It)

The Retweet Does Not Show Up In SeesmicDesktop

The Retweet Does Not Show Up In Tweetdeck

The Retweet Does Not Show Up In TwitBirdPro

(4) One exception appears to be Tweetie2. My @romensko retweet from the new interface does show up in my kegill_uw account in Tweetie2, just like it did on the web interface.

Tweetie2 Shows The New Retweets

So there you have it.

Be judicious in your use of the new retweet link if you think most of your followers read your tweets from a third party client, unless that client is Tweetie2. I’ll update this post as I test more clients.

Update: 10.30 pm Saturday
Here is the “base” tweet we’re looking for:

Another Test: New Retweet

And how that retweet “looks” at the kegill_uw account, in context:

Retweet in context at @kegill_uw.

(1) No Go: Twitscoop:

Twitscoop does not display retweets from beta interface.

(2) No Go: Twitterrific:

Twitterrific does not display retweets from beta interface.

(3) No Go: TwitBirdPro
There was an update for this application at the iTunes store, but it didn’t enable this functionality.

TwitBirdPro does not display retweets from beta interface.

Presentation at Convergence and Society: Changing Media Landscape, 6 Nov 2009, Reno NV

Consumers want to control their media consumption. This is a major shift in power that mainstream media organizations are still struggling with or, in too many cases, simply ignoring.

What’s annoying to those of us who have been involved with the evolution of online news for a while was illustrated by Thom Baggerman’s timeline of online newspaper research, from shovelware (1999) to “basic needs” (2003) that included interactivity and involvement by readers. By 2004, researchers were pointing to the need for a new form of storytelling. Baggerman was speaking at the Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape (#cconf09) in Reno.

I mean, it’s not like the forces facing news organizations simply appeared overnight!

Baggerman examined the LasVegasSun – a joint operating agreement between the Sun and the Review let them focus on the website. They have won a public service Pulitzer and “best of class” awards for their class (usually based on readership numbers). LVS makes it very easy to share multimedia content – unlike most news sites.

Baggerman examined newspaper websites for best practices (including WaPo and NYT), and then used those heuristics to analyze “television” websites. His conclusion: the TV sector should look to newspaper sites to learn how to share the content where they are supposedly the expert: “video.”

Major media owners in Canada are “crying poverty” to get regulatory concessions, according to Mark Edge,  speaking at the Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape (#cconf09) in Reno. And yet … they’re still making money.

His timeline of convergence in Canada, which limits foreign ownership:

See what happened to the over-leveraged firms before ….

… they went on a buying spree:

Their response to today’s recession:

Next month’s CRTC hearings will be interesting to watch, since CTV is threatening to close 10 stations, claiming that they are “not profitable.” And yet (1): analysis of their financials show that they made almost 10% profit last year. Moreover, most of the losses are “paper losses” because CTV has written down the value of their assets by as much as 75%. And yet (2): bidding for popular US programs has soared (up 43%) at the same time that TV owners are crying about being in the poorhouse.

Virtually every urban newspaper in Michigan has moved to a “hybrid” delivery model, based on the one introduced by the Detroit Free Press/Detroit News, according to Dennis W. Jeffers, speaking at the Convergence and Society: The Changing Media Landscape (#cconf09) in Reno.

The hybrid model introduced by the Detroit Free Press/News:

• Th/Fr/Su home delivery
• “e-press” (PDF-like) only the other days.

Detroit News and Detroit Free Press circulation have (each) declined 5.7%; contrast this with a general decline of 10%. There has been a small shift in revenue from advertisers to readers.

Evidence of the financial challenge (from today’s Editor&Publisher): “Clients [advertisers] have moved away from ROP [run of paper] because of the cost.”

There does appear to be a slow shift in newsroom behavior in Detroit daily newspapers. However, one problem: the average newspaper reader is 55 years old – behavioral change is predictably slow.

Community newspapers — as defined by geography or shared interests — are smaller (circulation 25-30K) and may be weekly, daily or online-only. This class of papers is losing advertising at a slower rate. In Michigan, there are about 250 newspapers (every county but one has a community newspaper) in this category; 200+ are weeklies, according to Carol McGinnis. Readership percentages appear higher than in the urban dailies.

Their emphasis on local news means that they have a unique product – something key to audience in our increasingly competitive information space.

Moving to “online only” papers: Lori F. Brost provides examples including AnnArbor.com, AnnArborChronicle, AnnArborUpdate, LeslinWeeklyGuardian, GrossePointeToday, TheRapidian, DomeMagazine, SustainableFarmer (MSU), Midland Issues on the Web, MichiganMessenger, MyBayCity.com, MyAntrim, RainbowMittens, RapidGrowth, ModelD, YpsiNews.com, LansingOnlineNews, AbsoluteMichigan, GreatLakesEcho, SouthwestLansing, WestMichiganNews (IRE), MichiganLiberal.com and RightMichigan.com.

AnnArbor.com “river of news” design (most recent first) that mixes local news with traditional newspaper content (such as Dear Abby). It serves as a portal for Ann Arbor neighborhoods (or it hopes to) with local bloggers. Business model remains an issue.

Sean Baker then turned to radio and television – “broadcast to bandwidth.”

The papers will (unsure of when) be posted on the conference website.

Back in March, Declan McCullagh reported that the Obama Administration cloaked its draft section of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) under “national security” wrappers — for the general public. At the same time, the document had supposedly already made the rounds of “corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S.”

Today, someone has leaked information about the U.S.-authored draft chapter on internet “counterfeiting” — a document scheduled for discussion among participating nations in South Korea on Wednesday.

According to PC World, under the treaty Internet Service Providers would become liable for copyright infringement. This is like saying that the telephone company is liable if criminals (or terrorists!) use the company’s assets to plot a crime. How absurd. But don’t be lulled into thinking that absurd means “won’t happen.”

ISPs around the world may be forced to snoop on their subscribers and cut them off if they are found to have shared copyright-protected music on the Internet, under an international agreement being promoted by the U.S. [...]

In a summary of the U.S.’s position shared orally with trade officials at the European Commission in September, signatories of the accord must “provide for third-party liability.” The Commission informed all 27 countries in the E.U. of the U.S. position in a memo seen by IDG News service. [...]

This provision would mean that every country that signs up to ACTA must allow content owners such as record companies and Hollywood studios to sue ISPs for failing to stop their subscribers from illegally sharing copyright-protected material such as music and movies.

In Canada, Michael Geist writes:

If accurate (and these provisions are consistent with the U.S. approach for the past few years in bilateral trade negotations) the combined effect of these provisions would to be to dramatically reshape Canadian copyright law and to eliminate sovereign choice on domestic copyright policy…  If Canada agrees to these ACTA terms, flexibility in WIPO implementation (as envisioned by the treaty) would be lost and Canada would be forced to implement a host of new reforms (this is precisely what U.S. lobbyists have said they would like to see happen).  In other words, the very notion of a made-in-Canada approach to copyright would be gone.

And at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow summarizes the leak, in part:

[T]he whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

Past time to be screaming bloody murder. (“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more,” comes to mind.)

• Call your Senator (most treaties have to be ratified by the Senate; don’t know about this one)
• Write the White House

Tell them in no uncertain terms that the the U.S. government does not have the right to make the ACTA negotiations immune to public scrutiny, especially when said negotiations are being coordinated with titans of global capitalism.

Then tell your friends, too.

This article also appeared at The Moderate Voice and Newsvine

Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and producer, is on UW campus today for the Danz lecture at Kane Hall tonight. He’s talking to students from two journalism classes this afternoon. Live blogged notes:

Three trends in media that are important:

(1) Changing economics “assault” of new media. not just delivery system. “Google” delivering free of charge what we spend money in producing. Lawsuits against Google. “Simply making it available”  as advertising shrinks, the news hole shrinks. new way to pack it.

(2) Decline in news standards – specifically verification. Driven by cable and bloggers to produce “psuedo” information which is dominating the information flow. Lots of unverified information – rumors and allegations. Important for democracy.

(3) Open to new kinds of news. Not so government-driven, politics/economics/business. more cultural news now, acknowledges that life is more varied than we used to think.

I don’t know where we are going. That’s going to be your generation.

Traditional standards of jrl are every bit as important as delivery mechanism.

“Retreat” from new media by the audience. It’s chaotic – so much going on. We’ll need someone to help us sort it out, what is quality. A lot of people are going to demand general flow of news.

We’ll be in turmoil for at least another decade.

When I get on the Internet, it’s like taffy – I get stuck! That’s awful. If you start communicating with someone they answer. Immediately. A lot of time and energy and words go back and forth but not necessarily a lot of understanding.

More and more corp and institutions are having internet “ban” days. (who has heard this???)

Challenging j-students to work with scientists on campus to get info about about science in a way that makes sense to lay people. “Translator.” This is hard work. Big gap between what scientists know and what general public know – very important. Break down the silos – that’s our job as communicators.

It’s not dumbing things down – it’s changing the pacing of information. What we do over the period of an hour is to give people new levels of knowledge every 4-5 minutes. Introduce at a pace where people can absorb it.

Kathy: future of public interest journalism?

We have to make judgments about the difference between opinion and knowledge. Talk radio is full of talk but not a lot of information. I’m tired of seeing “news” that is the equivalent of Kool-Aid and watching people pretend it’s good for them. Just sugar and water.

Why do German toasters last longer than ours do? Because German consumers are more discriminating. Then we’ll affect the market.

Q about FOX v CNN. Smith notes that CNN ratings started dropping when they left their core business – which was 24-hour news, not opinion. If we as consumers are willing to veg and tune-off, that’s what we will get.

Makes argument for Anderson’s “freemium” concept by focusing on the niche willing to pay for quality content.

“I remember when the NYT was thrown off its pedestal by TV.”

Listening to Google CEO Eric Schmidt talk about the importance of a “new platform” while noting that “enterprise-focused” engineers are a small percentage of the company’s engineering team, I flashed back to 1984.

When Apple introduced the Macintosh with that Ridley Scott commercial, the company was making a statement about the “cultural implications of personal computers.” Apple’s deliberate shunning of IT departments, Steve Jobs’ goal of democratizing technology, the 1984 slogan “The Computer For The Rest of Us”, the 1998 slogan “Think Different” — each are examples of a company positioned as the alternative to “the enterprise.”

For most of the 25 succeeding years, that positioning has been an uphill battle. The protagonists? First IBM, then Microsoft — which replaced IBM as “the enterprise” platform-of-choice — because most computers were bought by “the enterprise” not by the consumer. Last year, global laptop sales exceeded desktop sales for the first time, thanks in large part to consumer (not enterprise) demand for netbooks. Apple, which announced a shift in focus to laptops in 2003, has 75 percent of the laptop market for machines costing at least a grand. Yes, some of these machines are in “the enterprise” but they represent another cultural break on how personal computers are perceived and used.

Then there are smart phones.

In 2008, we bought 173.6 million smartphone ‘units’, according to PhoneMag. We’ll buy 159 million laptops this year, says The Guardian. Analysts right and left point to smartphones and mobile devices as the future of the Internet (and thus the future of computing).

Mobile is clearly computing’s next phase, and Google’s introduction of Android (a “platform”) and Chrome (a “platform”) might be viewed, one day, in the same historical light as Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh: paradigm-shift time.

Its rise has been phenomenal and, some say, unmatched. In 10 years, Google grew from being the new kid on the blog to “number seven in global brand power,” according to Gartner analyst Whit Andrews. Inquiries about Google from IT professionals are at an all-time high, according to Hung LeHong, even though Schmidt says Google doesn’t think about the market segments like the analysts do, because the line between “enterprise” and “personal” is disappearing.

Google is on track to dethrone Microsoft, which seems caught by incumbent organization paralysis in the face of disruption (Christensen). MSFT today: $27.60, trending down. GOOG: $536.71, trending up. Oh, IBM? $123.53, trending down. And AAPL, $188.85, trending down.

Listen to this snippet, where Schmidt talks about Google and “the enterprise”:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt At Gartner Symposion – Full Interview

Last week, Amsterdam hosted the eComm – Emerging Communications Conference and Awards, a twice-a-year global event launched in 2008. This “community focused” event focuses on convergence: telecom, cellular and Internet-based communication.

And even though GoogleWave is barely out of alpha, organizers put the architecture in place for collaborative notetaking for every session of the three-day event. Their experience foreshadows how GoogleWave could function as an incredibly disruptive super-application.

So what happened?

People shared. The gift economy at work.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the nature of this community-focused event or because GoogleWave is so new and shiny (also clunky). But I have attended (and helped manage) community-focused events, and my experience is that it’s hard to get community note-taking, even on easy-to-use wikis with geeks in the house. Twitter stream? Sure. Individual blog posts? Of course. But one central place for notes? Nada. Can’t even get all speakers to upload notes and slides to Slideshare.

Did folks share “alike”? Nope, some sessions have more notetakers than others. Some summaries are more “discussion” than “notes.” [See the screen captures in the Slideshare embed below.]

But. This is very early in the GoogleWave game. And while the interface is a little clunky, it’s also very memorable/learnable.

Skype In Wave
Nevertheless, one of the biggest ah-ha’s from this conference came from a blog post and Blip.tv video. The blog post was linked in session notes; I found it on Wave. (Heck, I found this conference on Wave; I’d not heard of it before.)

In this demo, we see a Skype call (ID not telephone number) launched from within a Wave (no stand-alone Skype client). As the two men chat, something is automagically recording the conversation as snippets, each associated with the speaker. In other words, it is doing for conversations what the LiveScribe (Pulse) pen does for meetings: it makes it easy to find a specific place in an audio record of a conversation.

As Phil Wolf at Skype Journal notes:

[It] deconstructs a long talk into directly referenceable snippets… This means you can annotate live calls with transcripts, pictures, etc. So the call’s Binary Large Object becomes binary tiny objects.

Third, because the snippets are referred to by a wave, other gadgets and bots can enhance the archive. Add or remove background noise. Translate and provide voiceovers in your language. Highlight statistically improbable phrases. Detect stress in a voice. Visualize the data in a timeline or a relationship scorecard (who talked more?). Add tags to help you find this wave again.

Of course, I immediately started thinking about recording “telephone” conversations, making the private public. How recording is illegal in the U.S. without explicit permission. How, once again, technology outpaces legal institutions. Here is another nail in the “off the record” coffin and yet another place for “private” conversation to be released into the wild, intentionally or accidentally.

Maybe Wave is going to be more disruptive than I’ve thought on first blush, particularly in the realm of perceived privacy.

Orwell was wrong. The tools of Big Brother are in each of our hands (our cellphones). Big Brother really is us, and GoogleWave might be the platform.

See how eComm participants used GoogleWave:

Last night in my econ class, I introduced students to the “amateur” v “professional” debate by talking about the  2007 Super Bowl,  the first time any major brand had engaged fans in a contest where the winner got a Super Bowl slot. At the time, the contest spurred discussion of “professional” versus “amateur”. Note that most of western science in the 1800s and even early 1900s was conducted by, you guessed it, amateurs.

For example, from a Washington Post story, January 2007:

“What this means is: You’ve got some kid with a video camera and he’s playing on the same field as everyone else, and he did the whole [ad] for, what? A hundred bucks?” said veteran adman Kipp Monroe, with Herndon’s White & Partners.

Also, it was in 2007 that Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen wrote The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. He’s still a critic.

My Fave:

Kristin Dehnert, who created the “Check Out Girl” spot, has a degree in Speech Communications from the University of Illinois. She wrote on her bio that she was “Location Manager and Scout for commercials as my paid ‘day job’ but my true passion is writing and directing. My dream is to make directing commercials and feature films my new ‘day job’.” She won 11 awards for a short film, “Underground.”

A Close Second:

The Dorito “Live the Flavor” ad was created by Weston Phillips, 22, and Dale Backus, 21, in North Carolina. They spent $12.79 … plus a lot of hours … and their existing investment in technology, of course. From their website (at the time):

We were trying to get into advertising in mid-October, a month or two before we saw the Doritos contest,” Phillips said. “When we saw the prize — $10,000 and your ad gets aired in the Super Bowl — we really didn’t think about the repercussions of having an ad in the Super Bowl. We were looking at the $10,000 and thinking, ‘That would be pretty nice.’

P.S. I don’t remember which one won!