Blogs are Op-Eds, Twitter is a Focus Group

That's the upshot of Mark McKinnon's latest:

Twitter is filling an important gap in the digital democracy -- a gap that most did not even know was there. If blogs are the inner monologues that occur after we have had a chance to sit down and think, then Twitter is the internal (albeit sometimes random) thoughts that most of us have all day long. Twitter allows us to tap into the collective brain; there is something very fascinating but strangely voyeuristic about this.

And (in contrast to my heading above):

Twitter is more than just a large, unorganized focus group; it is a link to real-time constituent consciousness.

An example:

For anybody who had his or her computer open to this page while watching the debate, it would have been hard not to notice the stark contrast between the stoic live audience and the very lively online audience. It was not as dramatic a shift as the first televised debates almost 50 years ago between Kennedy and Nixon, but more subtly suggested the game has changed.

Yes, sort of. I noticed that people in my Twitter stream all seemed to think that their candidate was creaming the other one -- even though they backed different candidates. Comments tended to focus on microlevel concerns such as candidates' facial expressions, verbal missteps, perceived slights, and imagined inner dialogues of the candidates. It makes sense that these spontaneous reactions came out of this spontaneous medium. Watching these Twitter streams allows you to see memes emerging, but also the prejudgments and entrenchments that people bring to the debates. They have to be triangulated with other, less spontaneous indicators to actually mean something for elections, I think.

You can't use Evernote for qualitative data analysis, even though it would be perfect

I mentioned a few days ago on my Twitter stream that qualitative data analysis tools are expensive and tended to lag other software, and that I preferred to build my own customized databases for QDA with MySQL and various front ends. More on that soon. But first, a few words about Evernote.

Evernote is described this way:

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Essentially, you install Evernote on all of your input devices, such as your laptop and iPhone, and capture the data you find most useful in the ways that you find most useful. So suppose that you see an interesting note on a whiteboard. You take a photo and it gets uploaded to Evernote. Text, audio, etc. all go to the same place and are accessible anywhere. Brilliant.

Whatever gets uploaded is "run ... through our recognition technology" and synchronized across all your input devices. Then you tag it and make notes. Tagging, of course, is a great way to code data. Now you have a vast, annotated, searchable database of heterogeneous data elements that can be accessed from anywhere and that is automatically synched (and therefore backed up). Perfect for qualitative data analysis, right?

Alas, no. Because any self-respecting institutional research board would balk at raw qualitative data being stored on a machine or server that is not owned and properly secured by the university. My IRB, for instance, specifies that data must be password-protected and stored on a hard drive that is encrypted at rest.

Hence I use a local, password-protected database running on an encrypted hard drive, and I set my screen saver to require a password for wakeup. I put audio, photos, etc. on the same hard drive. The drive gets backed up to a secure server. And anything I can't stick on the hard drive, such as physical collateral I pick up at the site, goes into a locked closet in my office.

Going to Iowa

Tomorrow I'll be flying to Iowa to visit my alma mater, Iowa State. Friday I'll deliver a rambling talk filled with personal anecdotes and accept an award.

If you're in the neighborhood, drop by!

BrightKite becomes useful

BrightKite's iPhone app now accesses the iPhone's GPS data. As you may remember, BrightKite was one of the early location-based services (LBS), but it didn't have an app for the iPhone launch or a way to extract GPS data. To update your location, you had to actually type the address. I quickly gave up on this. But the new app grabs the GPS data, which may give BrightKite a new lease on life as it competes with Loopt, Moximity, and other LBS.

Android's target

FastCompany repeats what many others have said: that Google's Android operating system is really targeting Windows Mobile, not Apple's iPhone. Well, sure.

On the other hand, initial reviews of T-Mobile's G1 have consistently said that it's a worthy competitor for the iPhone, although not as integrated or intuitive. This is terrible news for Apple, since Android is going to be deployed on several phones produced by several OEM's. If the very first one to be a worthy competitor, what happens when several OEMs compete with each other in refining the experience?

Going laptop-less

Abilene Christian has started a new program in which every student is given either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. (Those with iPhones have to foot the bill for their own service plans.) ACU supplies custom web apps that can be used with these handheld devices. Students can access campus maps and data in the cloud as well as class schedules, calendars, and so forth. They're a lot cheaper than laptops, and battery life is better (once you turn off 3G and rely on the campus wifi).

Obviously mobile devices are not substitutes for laptops or desktops ... yet.

Going paperless

Peter Merholz justly claims, "I called it!" The paperless office is back.

Let me take the occasion to make my own call. Unless the current economic straits are disastrous, we'll see an acceleration of this trend, with paper -- like email -- becoming primarily a way for younger workers to accommodate older ones. Of course, the worse the economy gets, the more older workers will delay retirement and the more paper will be used for routine communication.

A new ecology of work

A couple of weeks ago, Not an MBA posted some thoughts about the new ecology of work and its repercussions. The conclusion:

My feeling is that it’s time to compare notes, to look at these missing pieces and others, and to make sure that they are addressed in ways that benefit and serve the workers. Forget about the tags “coworking”, “Jelly”, etc. for a moment, and consider the near future in which work and workplace is increasingly defined as a network of intentional local spaces, and as communities of working peers with something in common beyond the accidental fact they work for the same company.

Right. I suspect we'll see some really interesting changes in sectors whose organizational structures are beginning to resemble rhizomatic networks rather than hierarchies. (In fact, there's a book on this issue of networked organizations.) And there's a lot more thinking to be done about how mobile telecommunications and cheap digital tools are reconfiguring workspaces and consequently work organization.

"The candidates may not have used online search while they were debating, but we sure hope they will every day they are in office."

ReadWriteWeb reviews how people Googled during the debates. Lots of fact-checking.

The Obama iPhone app

Talk about target marketing. The Obama iPhone app makes it easy to donate and call friends to persuade them to donate. Obama's campaign has been consistently adept at leveraging technology users.

No-so-Smart Mob

From BoingBoing: "A man robbed an armored car outside a Monroe, Washington bank and used a dozen unwitting accomplices to act as decoys during his getaway. He hired the accomplices on Craigslist and instructed them to wear very specific clothing."

How to survive ...

Not long ago, we were treated to blog posts on how to survive a zombie invasion. Now people are getting serious about how to survive a global financial meltdown. There's some overlap.

Surveying location-aware services for the iPhone

I'm late to the party on this, but TechCrunch has a nice overview, including Austin's own Moximity.

Droid Sans

Here's a story about the design of the default font for Google's Android.

C-SPAN's hub for the debates

I received an email yesterday letting me know about how C-SPAN will cover the debates Web 2.0 style:

I remember reading a post of yours a few weeks ago about the Web 2.0-friendly hub C-SPAN had launched for the two party conventions. I don't know if you've heard about it yet, but C-SPAN just announced the other day that they're going to launch a similar hub for the presidential debates; they're going to be following Twitter tags and monitoring blog posts that cover the debates. Here's the clip where they announced the new launch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwM3aikjdi8

Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

I do. Unlike the conventions, the debates I will probably watch live. But I'll also want to see what people are saying and tweeting about them, and I do like C-SPAN's approach of bringing these all together.

Network advanced copies arrived today

My advance copies of my new book Network arrived today (well, probably yesterday, but I didn't check my box yesterday). I'm happy to say that they look beautiful and that I am really excited to get this book out there.

Amazon is still showing the book as "pre-order," but I expect that will change soon.

Even in the US, we send more text messages than we make phone calls

That's what this story on texting points out. Among other things, it indicates that literacy is taking new shapes. As I've been saying over the last couple of years, these new shapes have been understudied and need to become more of a focus. And I mean by actual empirical researchers, not just people who grumble about MySpace supplanting great literature.

The Neanderthals died because they never quite figured out how to divide labor across large social groups?

That's one possible reason, according to this National Geographic article.

Cheap mobile phones for practical deployment of lifesaving technologies

Popular Science has a short article on how Dean Kamen (of Segway fame) is partnering with Nokia on an innovation challenge. Kamen's stake is to improve bottom-up organization in developing companies so that they can more easily deploy lifesaving technologies: water purifiers and generators. From the article:

Each purifier and generator provides enough power and water for a village; but, with one million villages in India alone, deployment is a challenge. In the past, Kamen has worked with multinational companies to launch his inventions, but the top-down approach of a big company doesn't mesh well with the million-village scale of this project.

The developing world has a high number of cell phones per capita -- the counterpoint to having very little in the way of landlines -- and the idea is that software running on Nokia's platform could be used to network and control a village's small-scale power and water supply.

Google Docs in the classroom

I mentioned on Twitter that I use Google Docs in my classroom, and someone asked me to write a short blog post about it. So here it is.

We're blessed at UT because at the CWRL we have several computer-assisted classrooms and the freedom to use these with various types of software. Last year, in the spirit of exploration, I had students write and submit papers using Google Docs, the web-based office suite. Google Docs allowed me to avoid the usual stack of papers as well as the email ping-pong that occurs when students email drafts to me. It also was easy to use -- basically it has the same level of capability as Microsoft Works -- so the learning curve was relatively shallow.

But I was more interested in the collaboration aspects. GDocs allows you to share your document with others, meaning that many collaborators can look at the same document and even edit it at the same time. It automatically allows features that you have to turn on in Word, such as edit tracking and comments. Paired with a project management system such as Basecamp, GDocs was a great way to support the dreaded group project. That's how I used it the first semester.

An added bonus was that I could embed my own comments in the document. That meant that I could review drafts and even insert grading comments directly into the text. (UT does not allow me to post grades on an off-campus server, so the grades are handled through UT's own gradebook application.) So I began to think about using GDocs for all assignments, not just the group project.

Last spring, I decided not to require GDocs. Instead, students turned in papers. It was a nightmare: versions floated around, it was hard to track which version was which, I had to wait until classtime to hand back comments. These are all common and unremarkable issues, but once I knew there was a better way, they seemed intolerable.

So this semester, I required all students to turn in all assignments on GDocs. I simply assign labels to them to differentiate the different classes and assignments (and I have one red label "_TO_GRADE" to track what I haven't touched yet). So far it's working well.

An added bonus is that I was able to lead students through peer reviewing via GDocs. Students inserted comments in each others' papers. When I reviewed the drafts later, I commented on these comments as well. It worked quite well.

I don't believe I've used GDocs to its maximum extent, but it's worked very well so far.

Questions? Drop a comment or drop me a line.