All self-deprecation aside, one of the easiest, most satisfying ways to string words together was to attempt both brevity and wit at the same time. To write an epigram encapsulating one thought, hopefully with some sort of sarcastic or otherwise clever twist on a conventional concept.

I read a lot of Byron and Coleridge in those days, so here’s an obvious example from the latter, a 19th Century epigram that might be followed by a #meta hashtag today:

What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

CUT TO: 2007, and suddenly there’s a medium for this sort of thing. 140 characters at a time, with an audience, and buttons to push allowing that audience to give the author instant feedback on just how much cleverness they had managed to wrap up in a neat little tweet.

Compare Coleridge’s couplet to this tweet from Merlin Mann, currently high up on the ‘Popular’ list at Favstar.fm, one of a species of site that tracks Twitter ‘Favorites,’ for those of you that use the little yellow star to mark the tweets you find most clever:

As @homerjsimpson might say, it works on so many levels.

***

Obviously, I’m not the first to make the epigram-tweet connection.

Here’s Morgan Meis in what looks like July 2009, running down a number of examples and parallels, including Dorothy Parker and @badbanana:

Voltaire once said “a witty saying proves nothing.” Exactly. Proof, like narrative, is a creature of triples; premise, argument, conclusion. Wit is a cheater. Wit sidesteps. Epigrams try to steal a sliver of truth without having earned it. Witticisms look for knowledge on the cheap.

And a bit less literary, but here’s Tim O’Reilly in September 2008, referencing something Jay Rosen said regarding Robert Scoble:

I only follow a few hundred people out of millions of twitter users, so I’m thinking that there must be tens of thousands of great lines waiting out there to be captured into a book of twitter one-liners.

There were, of course, and Nick Douglas snagged a book deal to gather them up in a neat little package called Twitter Wit.

Other notable Twitter-based book (and/or sitcom) deals for what might best be called collections of epigrams include @fakeAPstylebook and @shitmydadsays.

***

Now, I’m not here to criticize the Cleverness Economy — far from it. I’m a participant myself, favoriting all sorts of cleverness left and right, and occasionally producing linkless, mildly topical epigrammary, like so:

In the grand scheme of things, however, that clever tweet has nothing to do with creating any lasting value, and everything to do with engaging my friends/fans/followers/audience/co-conspirators on a regular basis, to keep them on the hook for longer, less clever content, such as the blog post you’re reading right now. If all goes according to my plan.

That’s the idea anyway.

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan nails the important part of balancing the “flow” of updates, tweets, links, and general social participation with the “stock” of long-form writing, blog posts, articles, and even books. What’s your stock/flow balance look like today? This week? This year? Here’s Robin on what happens if all you do is file tiny tweets, reblogs, and shares:

Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

Robin also rightly points out that search engines are more likely to glom on to the long-form stuff over time. It’s what will show up two years from now, although your engaged and active Twitter/Tumblr following will be a pleasant and useful thing to have around.

***

There’s a good solid metaphor in all this somewhere for online news if you feel compelled to seek it out.

It goes something like this:

“Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers.

But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. For example, I’ve gone back to this New York Times piece on the 2008 Democratic primaries more than a few times over the last year, sometimes for political reference, and sometimes just to demonstrate the sort of displays of information that interest me these days.

Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours.

***

There’s more out there to read about the Cleverness Economy if you’re interested. Anytime you see an analysis of Twitter’s codified “retweet” feature and it’s intentions, that might be part of it. The short bits of clever-set handwringing on the occasion of the shutdown of Favrd provide some insight into one corner of it. The somewhat related ebb and flow of Tumblarity appears to have played a part.

***

I’m not (ahem) clever enough to roll my ideas about this up into some pithy kicker to close with here. This is an ongoing exploration. There will probably be a Part 2.

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A roundup of things I found interesting so far this week:

Obama And Helen Thomas Celebrate Their Birthdays

UpTakeVideo | August 6, 2009
Can’t believe she didn’t get a question in about health care reform while she had him there.

Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Revised Edition
Brand New | August 5, 2009
That image you saw on Digg or Twitter about how Coca-Cola’s logo hasn’t changed in 100 years or so? Really? You sure about that one?

MySpace is to Facebook as Twitter is to ______
Cody Brown | August 6, 2009
Frankly, I think Cody’s off here. What was the Facebook to Blogspot’s MySpace? WordPress.com? Maybe, but Blogspot is still a successful platform. Same game with Flickr? I don’t think there has to be a replacement, but something else shiny will certainly catch part of our attention.

Auto-Tune the News #7

YouTube | August 3, 2009
Is it silly or is it satire? Either way, television news has always been a big goofy target for comedy, hasn’t it?

Why I believe in the link economy
Reuters MediaFile | August 4, 2009
Chris Aheam, President of Media at Thomson Reuters says: “I don’t believe you could or should charge others for simply linking to your content. Appropriate excerpting and referencing are not only acceptable, but encouraged. If someone wants to create a business on the back of others’ original content, the parties should have a business relationship that benefits both.”

I’ll have a lot more to say about that last concept, soon.

Oh, and updates to the Publish2 WordPress plugin I’m so pleased with will be coming to you any second now. Check out my blog’s sidebar, too.  (Thanks Daniel!)  Disclosure: Yes, I work at Publish2.

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Inspired by recent discussion about the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times guidelines for reporters using social media.

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1. I don’t write blog posts as often as I used to.
2. I share links all over the place, and I have for a long time now.
3. I have a new job that involves a lot of thinking about best practices for journalists who link to content they don’t produce themselves.

With those three things as givens, what follows is an exploration of how I share links.  If I ramble off on some tangent, feel free to jump in and stop me. [Sidenote: You can't jump in.  Is there a WordPress plugin for paragraph-by-paragraph commenting yet?]

Let’s start with a list of links to all the places I share lists of links, and a brief explanation of what sort of links I share there:

Google Reader (shared items)

I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds and scan, peruse, pore over, or otherwise read and digest blog posts, search results, news, video, photos, and sundry other hunks of content using Google Reader.  I do this using a Web browser (Firefox, most of the time) or an iPhone.  If I’m using my phone, I’ll often hit the “Share” link, but rarely “Share with note,” which means when I’m on the move, I’m not able to add much value to the links I share.  Sometimes, I add commentary to the shared link later, using FriendFeed.  Those of you who subscribe to my Shared Items feed or who are my friends in Google Reader itself aren’t seeing that commentary, but it shows up on FriendFeed, which in turn shows up in the sidebar of my blog.

Anything I read most of in Google Reader, or that I click through to read the comments on, or comment on, or think is worth sharing, not knowing if everyone else is reading the same things I am, I share.

Twitter

As of this writing, more than 2200 people follow me on Twitter.  That’s a lot more than read my blog’s RSS feed, far more than follow me on FriendFeed, and way more than the few people that see my Google Reader shared links in their own reader.  But it’s very temporary.  A link on Twitter has a short half-life.  It’s not a way to permanently save anything, but it is a way to get news out quickly.  If I think something is useful enough right now at this second, or if I think it’s good enough to pass along to 2200+ people without more than 100 characters of commentary, off it goes, URL shortened by bit.ly or (in a recent experiment to compare data presentation) tr.im.

I also retweet links from people I follow, especially if I think their base of followers and mine are especially divergent, if it’s an urgent call to action, if their commentary was particular funny, or if I really want to share the link, but I’m mobile, and hitting the RT button in Twitterfon is the easiest way to get the job done.

Delicious

When I started using Delicious, the first thing I did was post my own content there, tagging it in the hopes that someone would be subscribed to the tag, and would click through on my post.  I didn’t really get it.  Then, for a long time, I used Delicious as a linkblog, saving whatever I found interesting from around the Web, tagging it, and not really worrying about whether the content was temporary, immediately useful, or something to save for reference.

Now, my Delicious stream is pretty sparse, populated pretty exclusively by pages that I want to save for reference on a certain topic.  When it’s time to screw around with Django, I bang on my Django links in Delicious.

Publish2

Of course, my new job at Publish2 is one of the reasons I’m spending time thinking about my admittedly edge-case-ish linking behavior.  Right now, I’m using Publish2 to get a feel for the UI of the bookmarklet, to capture my own feedback as a user, and to pass along links to other places while sharing them in the collaborative space in the newswire at the Publish2 site and the feeds it builds for every tag.  You can find my Publish2 links in the sidebar of my blog, and on FriendFeed.  What you might not know is that I’ve been routing some to Twitter, too, using one of the cooler features of the bookmarklet.  (Of course, if you’re interested in how your newsroom can use Publish2 to do the same, just ask me.)

In fully functioning blog posts, every now and then.

Like what you’re reading.  I’ve been writing pretty sparingly on my own blog lately, but over the last four years it’s been a handy place to post thoughts both short and long when I see something elsewhere that inspires, offends, or otherwise jerks me into action.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed serves a variety of purposes for my linking habit.

First, it’s a catchall for everything I share online.  Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious, Publish2, my blog, my posts on IdeaLab, my Flickr photos, my favorite YouTube videos, Disqus comments, my Netflix queue — all of this shows up in my stream at FriendFeed and gets routed to the sidebar of my blog.  So everything I share online flows through my blog’s pages, providing complementary content, links, and proof of my existence in the long temporal gaps between posts.

The second thing I use FriendFeed for is to directly share links.  I end up using FriendFeed to share links that I find through Twitter, or links to full posts from partial text feeds (boo!) in Google Reader, or links to things I click on while reading posts in Google Reader, and it turns out the linked item is more interesting than the post that brought me there, and if you’re lucky I’ll remember how I got there and throw a “via” in. 

Wild card: If something I’m reading, anywhere, has an interesting image I want to share, I’ll use FriendFeed for that link so I can plant the picture in my blog’s sidebar.

There’s a third, social, function to FriendFeed, and that happens directly on the site or on my iPhone.  It’s me, mashing the “like” button on a regular basis.  That’s not exactly a way to share links, and neither is adding comments on other people’s links, but it’s something I do there.

So what?

So, nothing.  Just thought I’d share.  This is the part where I say, “How do you share?”

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1. Guy Kawasaki on How to use Twitter as a Twool.
2. Katherine Boehret writes YASEOT (yet another simple explanation of Twitter), but it’s at the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD site, so your editor and publisher will read it this time.
3. Old Media New Tricks has a brief guide to live-tweeting an event.

Bonus link: Merlin Mann’s metatweet regarding Guy Kawasaki’s approach, if you’re into that sort of comedy.

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Since then, he’s shifted his information production and consumption around from stream to stream as necessary to stay at the absolute front of the curve as news breaks.  In his case, it’s usually technology news that he’s engaged with, but take the following bits of this blog post to heart if you produce a news site of any size:

“Some of my friends say I’m really stupid to stop spending so much time obsessing over TechMeme and blogging and to be spending so much time on FriendFeed and Twitter.

That might be so. But already my inbound news is more diverse AND faster than TechMeme and my outbound “Likes” and “Comment” feed is pretty damn good cause it includes all sorts of different data types. Quick, how often have you seen a video on TechMeme? I can’t remember the time. But video is a HUGE part of news today and video and photos are huge parts of the experience on FriendFeed. Especially live video. That shows up on FriendFeed, it doesn’t show up on TechMeme. Well, except when YouTube throws a big concert. Then you see the news stories about the concert, but you need to click through articles to see the live video.” [The emphasis is mine.]

Read the whole thing.  It will make more sense if you’re familiar with the trends in technology news for the last few years, but you can substitute “traditional newspaper Web site” for TechMeme in a lot of places, as crazy as that sounds, and think about how faster, more personal gatherings of links to news and information (like what you get from the people you follow on Twitter or FriendFeed) are disruptive to that traditional editorial structure.

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This is advanced reporting with Twitter, jumping way ahead from using it as a tool to push out headlines, and serving a very different information need than the promotional / community building of a Colonel Tribune, as much as I admire that effort.

via @ksablan

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Plus, there’s a bit about the feature inspiration I picked up yesterday at blip.fm.

The evolving list of features I intend to add to ReportingOn is over on at blog.reportingon.com.  Check it out and let me know what you want to see happen there next.

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Jay:

“But the rules and assumptions underlying the fact checking regime are vulnerable to challenge from any campaign that a) doesn’t care if it’s called out, b) is willing to deny in a flat, affectless way realities as plain as the nose on Jay Carney’s shellshocked face, and c) has incorporated attacks on the news media into the heart of its appeal to voters.

In response to this extraordinary challenge to one of the most legitimate “checking” functions they have, journalists need a stronger spine; they have to call out the strategic use of deception and the amazing retreat from empiricism that we have seen from the McCain camp. And if Obama starts doing the same thing, they need a stiff spine for that too.”

Read the whole thing, which includes details on how and why Jay is encouraging the use of Twitter, Publish2, and other tools to monitor the status of the backbone of the press.

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