The amazing Robert Ebert details his Twitter addiction and lays down some smart rules for how to use the tool.
I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct.
The idea of the week goes to Dan Gillmor, who argued on Salon that if the U.S. government wants to save the news business then it should subsidize broadband access, not journalists:
If we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money in ways that could help journalism, let’s make that benefit a byproduct of something much more valuable. Let’s build out our data networks the right way, by installing fiber everywhere we can possibly put it. Then, let private and public enterprises light it up.
And at that point, we can step back and allow real competition to reign, not the phony facsimile that passes for broadband in American today, a broadband future that the carriers have loudly proclaimed their intention to control at every level. I’m not minimizing the difficulty of making this work; what I’m describing would come with many complications. But this is worth doing, because we simply can’t trust our future to the cable-phone duopoly or the relatively weak competition we’ve seen from wireless providers.
A Mother Jones Q&A with Ben Huh reveals a few facts about the Cheezburger emperor. His company has no direct sales force, he gets 100 applications for every opening for a community manager, and he’s allergic to cats. LOL.
One of the reasons is that in order for people to create lots of Internet culture, they need to be paid for their time, so they can sustain themselves. Not that they need to be profitable in a business sense, but somebody needs to reward them with some kind of financial gain so they can continue to do it as a living or as a decent side job. Money right now still exists primarily in television. There’s so much money in television advertising that needs to be fragmented and sent into Internet culture to make this work. That’s where the gold mine is, and it’s really the last frontier.
Let’s just say that Business Insider has its critics.
