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The post I made a couple of days ago about Twitter’s coverage of the sustained terror assault on the city of Mumbai was by far the most viewed post we’ve made here. It obviously struck a chord. Bits of it ended up on CNN Asia.

In that post, I was responding to the social melee forming around the end of a dirty big fire-hose of re-tweeting, rumour and shocked reaction. The thing I felt most strongly about when the terror was actually unfolding second-by-bloody-second was the triumphal glee that some contributors were expressing that Twitter was ahead of the mainstream media in reporting ‘the event’. In some peoples’ minds the main event was the defeat of CNN by Twitter and the ‘victory’ of social media in general. It was pretty ridiculous even at that stage as a very large proportion of the total tweetage was actually reporting what was happening on television - and then the re-tweets with added conjecture that followed.

A very few people indulged in really ugly displays of aggression and hate and this has, sadly, continued.

Yes, it does sound bad.

Some people say that this is just the way a real conversation works, you just put up with the noise and disparate views, but that’s nonsense. In meatspace you either walk away from the twats or you ask them to keep their voices down. In fact, the only conversations in any way ‘like’ the busiest period of the other night’s hashtag Mumbai event are shouty drunken lock-ins, the 11.45 booze-train burger queue at London Bridge Rail Station on a Thursday night, or a football riot. In any case, at that stage we weren’t looking for ‘conversation’ - it was precisely because Twitter was ahead of the curve and there was little ‘official’ information that we wanted to know so badly what was really going on. At that really critical early stage, working out what was happening was made much more difficult by these morons. It may sound elitist but, clearly, all views are not equal.

And this problem didn’t just affect rubber-necking news-junkies like me, it also made it more difficult to for those people who actually really needed to find emergency numbers, or ask for ask for blood donations. It must have been truly horrible if you were there trying to find out if a loved one was okay. The sheer volume of rubbish tweeting made it more difficult to find useful links. There were plenty of them, but maybe 6 out 10 tweets were just noise.

Sadly, it’s unlikely to be the last time Twitter is used in this way, and so I’ve been wondering if there are ways to introduce a filtered version of the next event-stream on a #Mumbai scale. I’m not suggesting replacing the #[insert event name] search stream - but offering an additional, optional stream that has been ‘filtered’ by a team of trusted curators. In a blog post he made yesterday JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta) put it like this:

Sometimes I think about all this as a giant virtual switchboard manned by volunteers, willing and able to help. We should be thinking about how we can improve all this. How we can set up this virtual switchboard effectively. How we can help quash rumours. How we can take the load off the security and emergency services people.

What we need is a team of international storytellers who we can trust to draw it all together, to verify, tag and reference the best quality external sources, to mix these up with edits from the main #twitstream, and to orchestrate an over-arching ‘telling’ of the story within which we can remain as participants in some way, but with filters. To put it bluntly, you’d get better quality info with all the twats filtered out. Some of it could be automatic - anyone using upper case would be automatically removed to start with.

Who could we trust to do this? People on Twitter with a certain level of reputation? People who have passed what would basically be a crowd-sourced audition? And what about brand-endorsed twitterers? Instead of childishly bashing CNN why don’t we all work together to create a global panel of ‘trusted twitterers’ with them - of people who have passed certain filters? Of course, even to think about doing that would require a new attitude to old media. We’ll have to get over the “CNN is so over, dude…” tendency. We must stop thinking that it’s necessary to continually demonstrate and celebrate the power of social media. And we need to be honest about how it needs to evolve and get better. I don’t feel as optimistic as JP does about the self-corrective power of the crowd. I’m not sure it’s good enough to say that because real-life crowds always result in Chinese whispers we should accept it as an inevitable fact of life on Twitter in all circumstances. Of course, it is inevitable - in the sense that we won’t change human nature - but we can use Twitter in many different ways, and one way to improve it for some specific circumstances would be to engineer a social editorial filter. Don’t we want Twitter to evolve, to mature, to become even better? What we use today is a very immature version of what all media might become - ever-present, real-time/near-real-time, personal, participatory. It can continue to be all of these things *and* we can make it better too.

The solution I’ve been pondering is deliberately technology-lite, and that’s because we need to come up with something now. I reckon you could probably do this using a Tumble-log - most of the effort would be involved in creating a network of trusted curators and agreeing some basic groundrules. Nevertheless, it would also be healthy to consider technological solutions. I found one service on the night that claims to have created an algorithm based on filtering contributions at the beginning of an ‘event’ (see below). I can’t work out how and I can’t see much evidence of it. Apologies if I’m missing something - can anyone tell me how it works? (It’s called Tweetip and you can find it here).

And then there’s the The Dashboard of Doom: a horizontally scrolling mash-up of the leading Mumbai related #hashtags, Flickr-streams and Dipity timelines.

Please drop me a line to let me know what you think about ‘the next time’, and how we might clean the signal up a bit.

I’ll leave you with a selection of some of the more striking screen-grabs I’ve taken from the #Mumbai stream over the last few days. And cheers to my brother Ben, who helped out with this and the last post.

…start following @stocktwits, where you can track real-time stock conversations. Twitter’s certainly making people creative. Take a look at this video to see how it works - Stocktwits for Dummies, pretty much!

Introduction to StockTwits from Knut Jensen on Vimeo.

There are a few reasons why I was interested in attending Amplified’08: one, I believe the UK has a very healthy system of interest-based groups, and this event aimed to bring them all together. Two, it was organised by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts), the body that serves as the front for innovation in the country and I was interested in seeing what they had to contribute, and three, I’m a part of a couple of the individual groups that were being represented at Amplified’08. 

The aim of the event was to create a ‘Network of Networks’, leading up to a huge TED-style event in 2010. A lofty ambition, but not entirely impossible, if it is planned properly. I can say that they have a long way to go yet. 

The event was organised unconference-style, with NESTA merely providing a venue. I didn’t see them getting more involved than that, but to be fair the event was put together in 2 months and it is likely that they will have greater involvement going forward. Largely, what was discussed was around the issue of social media - how social media can help businesses, musicians, education and so on. There were multiple discussions occurring simultaneously, as is usual with unconferences. The first one I was part of was a discussion on how companies can use social media to generate new business. Some of the issues that were brought out were that many clients today are still not convinced about social media, and that no matter what we say, the proportion of people like “us” - advanced users of social media - is still very little (someone who worked as a Microsoft evangelist said that of the large number of business people she spoke to, very few were actual users of Facebook or Twitter, for example). Another important point was that when brands have a presence on Twitter, they have to be very careful about not just sending out links arbitrarily into the Tweetsphere in a unidirectional fashion. They need to actively engage their consumers in dialogue if they are to get any benefit out of it. Related social media examples that were quoted were Samsung’s social media project with the Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin, where the photos clicked by Nick Turpin (who is a real person living in East Dulwich, if you were wondering!) would determine his next subject based on the photo that got the highest number of public votes, IBM’s Diggable Resources Center which was created following the revelation that a lot of useful white papers produced by IBM were being buried under the sheer volume of them, and Carphone Warehouse’s sheer lack of response to the number of grievances aired over their inept handling of the release of the new iPhone 3G. The presence of companies on Twitter was a topic that generated some interest - is it better to have multiple ID’s representing a client (as Zappos and Dell do) or a single Twitter feed representing the company as a whole? If it is the latter, what happens when multiple people take over the feed is that it leaves consumers feeling a lack of a personal relationship - which is what the Twitter ID was supposed to enhance in the first place. 

Another discussion I was part of focussed on the issue of multiple authors writing a book via a wiki (apparently this is an idea that a lady who works with Deloitte plans to put into action in the next few months for a client, and she was testing the waters). Very simply, it was agreed that there needs to be some direction provided at the outset with an outline of available chapters/sections and a call for experts to declare their interest, with issues such as multiple tones of voice and editing needing to be kept in mind. Nothing particularly groundbreaking there.

The best one for me was the one headed by Johnnie Moore on Less Talk More Play, where we got together in a group and played a couple of games: SoundBall (click the link to see what it’s about), and drawing a face with a partner, where pairs of us took turns to draw one feature of a face till we thought it was complete. From the first game we took back these thoughts: that people who play a game usually tinker with it to keep it interesting, that not everyone has to purse the same activity in order to be efficient, and that multi-tasking could actually be a fallacy - computers perform one calculation a time, for example, so it isn’t necessary that humans should be able to (this with reference to multiple ID’s and activities that we get used to doing in social media, almost as if we are a failure if we can’t manage them all). From the second game, I took this back: that an activity that seems inconsequential is actually consequential, because as with social media, relationships matter. 

As much as I enjoyed parts of it - the last segment I described, particularly - I was left with a feeling that if, as with the proposed wiki-book, there was some more direction, it would have been more fruitful. One session in fact didn’t even have a moderator - and we wound up with a large group of people in a room looking at each other, not knowing what to do. It was a great first-time effort by all involved - I’m not taking that away from them - but moving forward (Amplified ‘09 has already been scheduled for February, which is just a couple of months away), I hope there will be much more structure to the event. That’s the only way they can hope to achieve TED-status by 2010.

Chances are you didn’t know what to say. You probably didn’t realise at that moment, at the moment you posted your very first Tweet, what the hey Twitter was, how it worked or what it did. Can you remember what you said? Now you don’t have to - simply enter your Twitter user name at My First Tweet and be reminded.

This is what I said at 11:47am on 23 October 2006. God I’m interesting.

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