MediaBistro's AllTwitter blog is claiming it has an exclusive on the Twitter user who "broke" the news of Whitney Houston's death a full hour before the mainstream media.
Here's the problem with the claim: the user, @BarBeeBritt did nothing more than simply ask "Is Whitney Houston really dead?"
It's been awhile since I was in journalism school, but the claim that @BarBeeBritt "broke" the story is not in line with what I remember learning there. What I remember is that you did indeed break stories by reporting them first, but that verb is crucial: reporting, as in going out, gathering and verifying facts as opposed to the act of speculation and information seeking with a flick of your thumbs.
First there was linking President Bush with the words "miserable failure" on Google. Then last year Rick Santorum fell victim to another Google hack. This week it is Mitt Romney and the escapades of his long-distance car journey with his dog strapped on his car's roof that has gotten the Internets in a twist. Try Googling (or Binging) just Romney and look carefully at the results, you will see one link that is out of place. Sorry, we aren't going to show it here.
Apple shares set another all-time high today, closing above $509 for the first time ever. The sky's the limit, it seems, as expectations build around Apple's new iPad, due next month, and on the heels of a crazy record holiday quarter.
And here's an amazing thing: Even with Apple's size and momentum, there's still plenty of room left for growth. In its most important markets - mobile phones and personal computers - Apple is still being dramatically outsold by competitors.
That in mind, it's also reasonable to ask: How long can Apple keep its streak alive? When will it peak?
Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of the hottest companies in the world.
Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal professional development, so I asked a few experts in the field. This is what they said.
Sometimes we have bad days. It's a part of being human, part of working in a stressful time and place. Among the problems of being a blogger are that it exposes one's weaknesses, magnifies the limits of one's personal perspective, and often amplifies our feelings beyond what we might have intended. I have avoided being a blogger in the traditional sense partly because I'm fairly certain that you don't care - nor should you - about these things as they pertain to me.
Andy Rooney was among the greatest news writers of his generation. But during the latter stages of his life, he complained about how awful life had become, about how things had ceased to be familiar any more, about how disruption had left his world a blur. Rooney's complaints had become emblematic of what has been perceived as the decline of the role of television as an information medium. So when M.G. Siegler spends a few minutes with us in the same vein, complaining about how the object of his career up until recently has been "bulls---," one wonders whether this should be emblematic of the end of something else.
Algorithms, and, more recently, social media sentiment, have been billed as the one-step panacea for all of life's problems. Tweak the algorithm just right and you get the perfect romantic partner. Read the social media sentiment correctly and you can become rich by predicting the ebb and flow of equities markets.
If only it were that easy.
Writing in Sunday's New York Times, social psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Benjamin R. Karney question claims by dating sites like eHarmony, which promise us happily-ever-after with someone who has been "prescreened for deep compatibility with you across 29 dimensions." And maybe its high time we applied the same degree of skepticism to all the social media prophets promising fail-proof predictions based on close scrutiny of Twitter's API.
Social media sentiment can predict fluctuations in stock market volume as much as six to seven days ahead of time, according to a Harvard Business School doctoral candidate who has been studying the impact social media has on equities.
That could become a valuable tool for hedge funds and investment firms. High volatility often makes it easier for firms to trade stocks. Volatility predictions can also be factored into more comprehensive trading models and better predict whether a stock's price will rise or fall.
Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.
Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.
Although predictions last week raised expectations about the role that social media would play in reshaping what has historically been one of the most engaging non-holiday events in the U.S. every year, the first analysis of yesterday's public social network data by advertising analysis firm Networked Insights makes a compelling revelation: Almost three-fourths of the chat taking place among Twitter and Facebook users Sunday night had nothing to do with the game itself.
In fact, according to Networked Insights' data, the Super Bowl topic that trended in third place was "Brady," but when you break that topic down, you realize it may actually have been more about Mrs. Tom Brady - supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who appeared on camera perhaps once during the game, whom Tweeters evidently referred to as "Mrs. Brady" or perhaps "Lady Brady" - than about the New England Patriots quarterback.
Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry's biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world's biggest social technology company? They've raised a number of interesting questions so far.
It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company's unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg's public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a cultural phenomenon of historic proportion, what does the Facebook IPO mean with regard to gender?
