When Mike wrote about James Karl Buck’s use of Twitter this week to alert his friends when he was arrested in Egypt for photographing a demonstration, I wondered if my little hometown paper would pick up the story.  Today, they did, with a good article by Mike Musgrove.  It’s another example of the benefit of being able to make your friends aware of what’s going on in your life right now whenever you want or need to. 

Then again, it also hints to some concerns about documenting your day to day life.  Does your company have a list of keywords it searches for in a Twitter feed before it makes a hiring decision?  If so, do they take things out of context or really try to understand the situation?

This isn’t a post about politics, it’s about how creativity spreads.

When I was a kid, if I created something that I thought was cool I might show it to my friends and family — an audience of, say, a dozen (I didn’t have many friends). Even professionally-creative adults way back then, who were capable of making something that actually was cool, would have to go through a lot of effort to get that cool thing out to more than just their inner circle. Distribution was hard.

In case you haven’t seen this video, it’s another good example that times have changed.

will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas isn’t into politics, but he watched Barack Obama speak in New Hampshire on January 8th.

In a moment of inspiration he turned that speech into a song, then made a video with his friends. Even as recently as 2004, that probably would have been the end of it. But it’s 2008, so he put the video online and within a few days millions of people had watched it, potentially influencing the outcome of a Presidential election. The story in his (trimmed) words:

but that speech…
it inspired me…
I came up with the idea to turn his speech into a song…
so I called my friends…
and they called their friends…
in a matter of 2 days…
We made the song and video…

Usually this process would take months…
a bunch of record company people figuring out strategies and release dates…
but this time i took it in my own hands…
and we did it together in 48 hours…
and instead of putting it in the hands of profit we put it in the hands of inspiration…
then we put it on the net for the world to feel…

And the video:

When distribution is free and easy, creativity (with a flash of inspiration) goes a lot farther than is used to. So go do something creative, put it out there, and see what happens.

Darren recently posted about the SethGodin account on Twitter, which is run by someone who simply tweets every time Seth writes a blog post.  This morning, Seth (the real one) posted to explain why he’s not really using Twitter, even though “he” has almost 1,500 followers.

“In 1993, we installed a primitive form of chat on our network at work. I think it was called SnapMail. I discovered pretty quickly that I was spending three or four hours a day using it. I was really good at it. And I also didn’t get as much done as I needed to. So we ripped it out. Just because it was stimulating doesn’t meant it helped with our goal.”

Does Seth think that Twitter is just idol stimulation?  A meaningless distraction?  A worthless time-suck?  I don’t think he does.  He also says:

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I spent some time this morning talking with my three year-old daughter about Martin Luther King Jr.  I did my best to put into simple terms why he was great man, and his contributions to making the world a better place.  I wanted her to experience his speeches directly, so we watched a couple of shows on the History Channel and some videos on YouTube.

Being able to see the footage of his inspiring speeches and the protests that took place during the civil rights movement reminded me of one of my engineering courses at Virginia.  In it, we discussed how the television coverage of these protests — which often showed police officers attacking defenseless, peaceful people with water cannons, batons, and dogs – influenced Americans across the country in much more profound ways than photographs and news reports had previously.  In many respects, television was the technical catalyst that propelled the horrible realities of racism into American living rooms everywhere, to the point where the issue could no longer be ignored.

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The Library of Congress has 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials, much of it without any metadata (who is in a photo, where it was taken, etc.).  How do you collect all that metadata with a limited government staff and budget?  One way is to have smart people work with an innovative company to form a partnership whereby an active online community can willingly do the hard work for you.  A huge team doing small bits of work can accomplish a lot more than a small team trying to do a seemly endless chore, so they’re starting with 3,000 photos and asking us — the community — to tag them with anything we can contribute.  It’s yet another long tail strategy.  Read about The Commons on Flickr and the Library of Congress (announced today on their blog).

There are countless opportunities for the government to leverage web technologies and communities in ways that will help agencies fulfill their missions and benefit the public in a number of ways.  It’s great to see the Library leading in this area — I hope others follow.

Misery loves company.  It’s true in life, and it’s true on Twitter.  When you don’t feel well or are going through a difficult time, most people feel better when they share their experience with others.  It’s human nature.  To some extent, other people appreciate engaging with people going through a challenge, either indirectly (watching a drama unfold from afar) or directly (being able to support a friend in need). 

These long-standing realities of human interaction are taking place on Twitter, highlighted by two recent high-profile examples:

1. Jason went through a travel nightmare.  His tweets along the way provided dramatic entertainment for his 5,000+ followers, including Fred.
2. On a much more serious note, the recent passing of Marc Orchant inspired dozens of blog posts.  As news of his heart attack unfolded, however, it spread quickly on Twitter, with those who cared about were Marc compelled to share their concern and support.

A less public and more personal example occurred this past week.

Over Thanksgiving, I set my mom up with Twitter (and Snitter).  I set her to follow my brother and me, and honestly didn’t expect her to tweet.  She lives alone about an hour away from us, and her work has her online a lot, so I figured she’d just enjoy seeing tweets about what her kids (and grandkids) are up to all day. 

Much to my surprise, she was tweeting immediately, mostly about things happening around the house.  Occasionally she’d tweet about her old dog Lucy, who hadn’t been doing well for the past several months.  About a week ago, with the support of her vet, she made the very difficult decision to have Lucy put to sleep.  She emailed the family, and we talked about it in person (you know, old school human-style) during a recent visit. 

In the days following her decision, mom’s tweets were telling.  “Wishing Lucy was a lot younger” and “Feeling sad about my dog…” and “I don’t want to say goodbye to my dog.” and ultimately just “Two more hours.”  Mom is too strong and independent to ask more of us to be there with her (my oldest brother, who lives nearby, was), but it was clear that being able to share her feelings passively with more people along the way was comforting for her.  We emailed her and called her, but group support via Twitter somehow seemed best — a way for us to deal as a family.

For me, it was another example of technology being both wonderful — it allowed a degree to connectivity with my mom during a tough time that never would have happened otherwise — and completely insignificant.  Human nature shows through, no matter what tools we happen to be using at the moment.

The coolest thing about what’s going on with the Web right now is that game-changing innovation is sparked by small teams of smart, motivated people who just do stuff.  They try things.  They hack on their ideas and put it out there.  Some take off, some don’t.  The difference between now and 8-10 years ago is that the audience is really there, so the really cool ideas can really take off.  And thanks to open source software and open platforms, part of that “take off” is others contributing to the ideas to make them better.

This model has been limited to software, but BugLabs is taking it to hardware.  The BUG is a collection of open-source hardware modules that you can snap together to make your own custom device.  If they can successfully connect these gadgets so that the collaboration and community building can happen as seamlessly as it does online, there’s no telling what people will come up with.  Check out the video with founder/CEO Peter Semmelhack and marketing guy Jeremy Toeman:

It’s cool to see this “rough” product display, brought to us via a cell phone video interview, generating buzz and getting the word out.  No need for fancy marketing speak and flashy demos.  I’ll take an unedited chat with a founder/CEO showing off his/her product any day.  In this case, my favorite quote from Peter is:

“I’m building it because I really want it.”

That’s how the best stuff comes to be.  Kudos to Scoble for the interview.  My second favorite quote is Peter calling his company “Bell Labs” — a mistake I’ve never made at Viget Labs.

My dad, who was hacking on hardware and software as far back as I can remember, would have loved this thing.

Jim did a great job presenting about Twitter at the DC Social Media Club meeting last night (hosted at Viget.)  He told some engaging stories about his Twitter habit, and how he’s used the service during everything from the Virginia Tech tragedy to his travels to Iraq with President Bush. 

The discussion got me thinking more about how Twitter is being used practically, right now, to address real business issues.  I experienced an example this week.

I’m a fan of Mixx, in part because I love to see local start-ups do well.  They’ve been getting Crunched lately, which is cool.  I signed up a while ago, but I’m not very active yet.  I do have the “Allow other users to share Mixx items with me” option checked, which I believe is the default.  I’d never received an item from other users, though, until this week when I pulled up my email to see about a half-dozen emails from Mixx, all saying “Someone has shared a link with you from mixx.com.”  I was surprised, and happened to tweet:

“wondering why i have so much email from mixx this morning”

1 minute later I got this reply from Justin, so I figured something was up system-wide:

“@barn: i have a lot of mixx e-mail this morning too”

3 minutes later I got a direct message from Will, who works at Mixx:

“we are fixing the issue as we speak. Someone did a little spamming last night.”

Had I been concerned (which I wasn’t) my concerns would have been allayed.  Communication problem solved. 

Now, I know Will — we follow each other — so that was easy for him.  Following all of your users might be difficult (but why not try?).  He could also track the keyword “mixx” and contact complete strangers the same way, when needed.

Is this a good way to use Twitter?  Is this an efficient way to communicate with your users?  Regardless, it’s effective and it’s working right now, so why not use it?

I still read the print edition of the Washington Post every day, just like my dad did.  I rarely read the online version because I don’t want spoil tomorrow’s print copy (I check cnn.com now and then for “current” news, and generally assume that if something really interesting is going on I’ll hear about it quickly.)  When it comes to press consumption, I’m pretty old-school.

I have an underused Facebook account and I’m fairly active on Twitter.  I’m a heavy email user, light SMSer, and probably average phone caller.  I IM a fair amount, mostly with co-workers, and blog occasionally here and on viget.com.  When it comes to communications, I consider myself fairly savvy, but not exactly cutting-edge.

I opened the Post today to see, to my surprise, the Viget logo front-and-center on the cover of the business section. 

Not only is our logo clearly visible, but the caption reads “… at Viget Labs in Falls Church …”  For anyone who knows Viget, it’s immediately visible.  As a friend said to me today “you can’t buy that kind of exposure.”  True.  But with whom?  And to what end?

In addition to the print version, the article is available online.  In this version, though, Viget is much less of a focus.

The photo is cropped such that our logo is gone, and the caption has no reference to Viget either.  Anyone who read the article online wouldn’t even see a Viget reference until 1/2 way through page 2. That’s fine, by the way — the article is about Startup Weekend, not Viget.

Right after I read the article, I blogged about it on Viget’s Four Labs.  More than a dozen contacts who saw the article – some I hadn’t heard from in years — emailed me to say “congrats on the coverage.” 

One contact called and left a voicemail.  One contact wrote a “congrats” on my Facebook wall — a savvy web user, no doubt. 

No one contacted me via IM, SMS, or Twitter.  No one took the opportunity to comment publicly on the Viget blog (alas, comment-less posts are still somewhat common.) 

This activity is interesting to me because in parallel I’ve recently had several communications with people via direct messages in Twitter or private messages within Facebook that have caused me to say “why don’t they just email me?”  Presumably because they are not heavy email users.  Or maybe my email address is hard to guess.

From all this I developed this brilliant hypothesis: older people still read the paper in print, and they react to it by making phone calls and sending email.  Younger people read news online, and increasingly communicate on social networking sites and other non-email means. 

Also: print news is dying, but that’s nothing new.  Email is in trouble too, and for good reason. 

Online communication is a mess, exacerbated by things like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be.  There is a solution that will allow us to break free from the chains of old email habits without fragmenting into dozens of disconnected platforms.  It will let us consume, collaborate, broadcast, and chat all in one, and will include fantastic history and search.  It will ignore traditional technical limitations and be modeled after real-world communications but still be intuitive enough for old email vets to transition effortlessly.  I predict, in fact, that it will learn from us automatically and be available before we even knew it existed without changing a single habit.  And I can’t wait.