Why you should use Twitter’s built-in retweet feature

Yesterday, Shoq offered two reasons you shouldn’t use Twitter’s built-in or “native” retweet feature. Me, I much prefer the new-style native retweet function, and I tell you why later. But, first, I think Shoq and others are wrong for preferring the old-style retweet.

First, Shoq argues that if everyone uses native retweets, we’ll all miss important things.

Repetitive tweets tell you a story mattered to a lot of your followers. You might ignore the first few retweets you see, but when the 3rd, 4th or 5th come in, you’re going to notice, and may well be glad that you did.

This is true if all people are sharing is the original tweet and not engaging in any sort of conversation or adding their own thoughts. If a story is important, people will be adding their thoughts and sharing other links to important parts of the story.

Now, this might seem to reinforce Shoq’s second reason against using native retweets:

Users can’t add their own comments to the built-in retweets

This is true. You can’t add a comment to the original tweet with the new-style retweet. But with only 140 characters it’s hard to do that with the old-style retweet without completely mangling the original tweet anyway. If I want to reshare a link and add my own comment, rather than butchering the original poster’s words I prefer write my own post and credit with a “via @username” at the end.

Native retweets give my followers control over seeing what they’re retweeting since I can turn off native retweets on an per-user bases. I can’t do that with old-style retweets. Native retweets keep 15 instances of the same post out of my timeline. Native retweets shares original tweets without the need to mangle “to,” “your” and “for” into “2,” “yr” and “4.”

Twitter’s native retweets are certainly imperfect, but I find the hard-core stances against native retweeting hard to understand.

Filling the X-Files void

As a teenager, I was introduced to, and loved watching, The X-Files. Sunday appointment viewing and when it jumped to the big screen, it was one of only two movies I made a point to see opening day.

Then David Duchovny quit and the Agent Mulder disappeared and Robert Patrick joined and became the new Agent Scully and the old Agent Scully turned into the new Agent Mulder and it sucked and then The X-Files went away for good.

Then I was introduced to Fringe. It hit the same sweet spot that The X-files had.

But now that Fringe is getting closer to death, I need a replacement.

So what’s it take for a show to hit that same geeky place in my heart? I think these are the elements:

  • Suspenseful science fiction
  • Set on present day planet Earth
  • Normal people investigating some grand unknown (black oil of The X-files or the other dimension of Fringe)
  • But not too much focus on “mythology” over “monster of the week” episodes
  • Focus on a few key relationships (Mulder and Scully. Peter and Olivia. Dr. Bishop and Peter.)
  • Great dialog with deadpan humor

A couple weeks ago I put the question to fellow Fringe and X-file lover Jordan Running on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/#!/bergus/status/18820933749837824

He came up with a couple:

http://twitter.com/#!/swirlee/status/18825547899469824

I also asked on Aardvark and got a few suggestions:

  • The Lost Room
  • Lost
  • Carnivale
  • Surface
  • Primeval
  • The Adventures of Sarah Jane
  • The Middleman

And here’s my thought: Torchwood. Let’s see if it hits my necessary elements:

  • Suspenseful science fiction ✔
  • Set on present day planet Earth ✔
  • Normal people investigating some grand unknown ✔ except Captain Jack Harkness
  • But not too much focus on “mythology” over “monster of the week” episodes ✔
  • Focus on a few key relationships ✔ only a few more characters
  • Great dialog with deadpan humor ✔

Am I missing some important elements? Are there other heirs to The X-Files throne?

UPDATE:

Another suggestion

http://twitter.com/#!/stephdavidson/status/20972747546959872

Another flap about which I don’t care

These three tweets from Jay Rosen sum up the whole Keith Olbermann thing and why I don’t really care about it.

(Also, I really wanted to test out the new Blackbird Pie plugin.)

Metaphor: hamster wheel

The eternal squeaking wheel
Dean Starkman’s The Hamster Wheel, in the Columbia Journalism Review

Without getting into whether newspapers are worse or better than before—let’s concede they’re fabulous; that’s why everyone loves them so much—we should pause for a second and think about the implications of the do-more-with-less meme that is sweeping the news business. I call it the Hamster Wheel.

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics (Bloomberg!). It is “Sheriff plans no car purchases in 2011,” (Kokomo Tribune, 7/5/10). It is “Ben Marter’s Home-Cooked Weekend,” (Politico, 6/28/10): “Saturday morning, he took some of the leftover broccoli, onions, and mushrooms, added jalapenos, and made omeletes for a zingy breakfast.” Ben Marter is communications director for a congresswoman. It’s live-blogging the opening ceremonies, matching stories that don’t matter, and fifty-five seconds of video of a movie theater screen being built: “Wallingford cinema adding 3 screens (video),” (New Haven Register, 6/1/10). But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

Metaphors: TBD.com special

A supermarket for news
Robert Allbritton, quoted in Paul Farhi’s TBD.com making its move into the crowded market of local news, from The Washington Post

Right now, [getting local news on the Web] is like trying to buy groceries in the old country. First you went to the fishmonger, then to the baker, then the grocer and so on. And it worked until someone said, “Why don’t we create a supermarket and put it all together in one place?”

News judo
David Rothman’s TBD’s hyperlocal judo is smart and ethical: How should rivals at the Washington Post and elsewhere respond to all the linking ahead?

In judo, you can use a big guy’s weight against him, and the same applies in busi­ness, especially the news kind.

Reading the Washing ton Post story on the TBD local news startup — which will compete against the Post, AOL’s Patch local net work and the Washington Examiner — I couldn’t help but think “judo.”

…

Besides, in the end, the Post story today will have been just a sideshow despite its current benefits to TBD. The real judo will happen by way of a principle espoused by Jeff Jarvis, the media guru of BuzzMachine fame—in essence, Do what you do best and link to the rest. TBD’s own news staff is tiny, with just a dozen or so actual reporters and a small band of editors. So, to try to compensate, TBD will be regularly linking not just to the Post but also to the Examiner and Patch, which has drawn more than a few dollops of money from America Online.

Tom Sawyer as newsboy
Mark Potts’ Why TBD is Important

As it develops, I think TBD is going to prove a model for other local efforts around the country. It understands something very fundamental, something that once upon a time, a group of us referred to it as the Tom Sawyer strategy: when you’re working with limited resources, use them to the maximum–and turn to the rest of the Web for help with filling in the blanks.

A Coal-mine canary for news
Jack Mirkinson’s TBD.com: A First Day Look, from the Huffington Post

Why is so much attention being paid to a local news site? Well, TBD is something of a canary in the coal mine. The news industry is desperately searching around for new journalistic and business models, and local news has been seized upon as a potential savior. Local, so the thinking goes, is where the money’s at — where you can offer people something they can’t get anywhere else. This explains the rise in so-called “hyperlocal” coverage, which hones in with intensive zeal on the day-to-day happenings in neighborhoods and regions.

Metaphors: a farting dog and a wandering prophet

A farting killer dog
Adrian Monck’s Can apps save news journalism?

[W]here does the rise of the app leave the news business, the flatulent Rottweiler in the dog shelter of online content? Can apps give it a caring home at last?

Moses wandering the wilderness
David Cohn’s Generations in the Desert – Thoughts from Aspen

I’ve said before that professional journalists, in one interpretation, can be thought of as a diaspora. Their “home land” in newspapers has been compromised. If there is a promised-land for media, considering generational theory, it might be that this transition we are in will last much longer. I joked that unless I live to be as old as Moses (120) I won’t live to see the dawning of this new digital age. I am doomed to be part of that cusp generation that must wander in the desert with the elders who remember something long passed and can’t settle into something new. Meanwhile acting as a steward and trying to head north to a new land with a younger generation to take over for me.

via Steve Buttry

Metaphors: supermarket and farmers’ market

Robert Allbritton, quoted in Paul Farhi’s TBD.com making its move into the crowded market of local news in the Washington Post

“Right now, [getting local news on the Web] is like trying to buy groceries in the old country. First you went to the fishmonger, then to the baker, then the grocer and so on. And it worked until someone said, ‘Why don’t we create a supermarket and put it all together in one place?’ “

John Hawbak, on Twitter

By focusing on partnerships with local producers, TBD sounds more like a farmers market than a supermarket.

via Steve Buttry

Metaphors: maggot-infested meat, everything but the kitchen sink

Steak and maggots
Gene Weingarten’s Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga.

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

Everything is different today, and it’s much more confusing. For one thing, there are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as “a subspecies of goat.”

Fortunately, this new system enjoys the services of tens of thousands of fact-checking “citizen journalists” who write “comments.” They will read the Uzbekistan story and instantly alert everyone that BARACK OBAMA IS A LIEING PIECE OF CRAP.

I basically like “comments,” though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It’s as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

It’s like everything but the kitchen sink
Steve Buttry’s Academics measure new media (again) by old-media yardstick

To measure what citizen journalism is doing in the Washington area, you need to study dozens, if not hundreds, of sites and blogs. Especially if you’re studying whether citizens could “replace” old media, you need to look at the full citizen effort. The cliché of bad comparisons is that you’re comparing apples to oranges. This is more like comparing an apple to a grape. A grape will never replace an apple. But a bunch of grapes might provide similar or more nutrition, even if one makes a better pie and the other better wine. These researchers didn’t study the full bunch of grapes that exists in every metro area.

These studies miss the point as badly as if you were to study whether NASCAR will replace horse racing. One kind or racing is declining and another is rising, but no one is replacing anyone here. The media revolution we are experiencing and witnessing isn’t like trying to replace an old quarterback by sending in a younger one (a story most traditional media would give more coverage than your average watchdog story).

Admission: On rereading, I notice that I have gone on a metaphor spree here: auto and horse racing, quarterbacks, fruit, watchdogs, a yardstick. Each of them makes the point I wanted to make, though, and I decided to poke fun at this weakness in my writing because I don’t have time to fix it today. I’ll just point you to the news-business metaphor collection Nick Bergus is compiling (at my suggestion, ironically enough). It’s so much easier to recognize my weaknesses in the writing of others.