Not to discount the fact that the word blog was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, it wasn’t until the launch of Blogger on 23rd August 1999 that blogging really began to gain traction.  There is no doubt that the launch of Blogger by Meg Hourihan and Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams was the beginning of a massive shift in media production and consumption that would continue to 2009.

If you look back at how blogs looked in the early 00′s, they were true grass-roots media. It was an opportunity for anyone to publish content easily on the web. I doubt that anyone had the inkling that blogging might become so popular back then, but there is no doubting the shift it has caused in the media landscape.

Today, it is difficult to distinguish between blogs, news hubs, online newspapers and pretty much any online destination. Blogs that started years ago have become media behemoths. Often with influence beyond that of “traditional” news sources. While the “traditional” news sources are and have been blogging for many years.

With all this blurring and convergence, where does it leave blogs? Anyone can still create a blog. So, in a sense, it is still grass-roots media. But there’s very little chance that any blog created today will be able to grow to the size that the likes of Gizmodo, TechCrunch and Mashable have in the short time that they did. So is blogging still what blogging set out to be?

Wired editor Chris Anderson made an interesting, yet rather pretentious claim recently in an interview with Der Spiegal:

…I don’t use the word media. I don’t use the word news. I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like “horseless carriage”

It’s a slightly baffling claim, but one I can see sense in. Print newspapers are dying; are the pigeon hole definitions we’re using contributing to this? Wouldn’t it be better if we stopped trying to recreate online what we had before? I think the same is true with blogging. Blogging isn’t dying, it’s stronger than ever, but can it really be called blogging any more, or has it changed into something different from what it started out as.

Anyway, I’m straying from my point. Blogger is 10, it has helped to revolutionise an industry faster than any other communication technology before it, and I think that is something worth celebrating!

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• Before There Was Twitter, There Was Blogger. And It’s Turning 10. (techcrunch.com)
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Kirsty Wark was given the pleasure of reading out a list of questions submitted by a mixture of Twitter users and readers of the Newsnight blog. What a fantastic opportunity this is to probe Twitter’s CEO about how they plan to make money or how they see their service developing in the future. But instead, what should have been a interesting and probing first UK interview by one of the BBC’s most grilling presenters, ended up being rather cringeworthy list of questions that echoed the arguments that pretty much every non-twitter user seems to come up with when they decide they don’t really understand the point in it.

Williams must have been more than a little bit baffled that in his first UK interview, he was answering questions such as “Isn’t this just really a service for reading what famous people are doing?” and “But do you feel comfortable about the fact that when you go on Twitter, and you look for Demi Moore, there’s several Demi Moores, you can’t verify who the real Demi Moore is – does that not worry you?”. Huh, Evan? Is that what keeps you up at night? I’m sure the fact that your company has been around since 2006, is projecting 25 million users by the end of the year and hasn’t yet made any decent money out it makes you sleep like a baby.  Figuring out who the real Demi Moore is must be a real pillow turner.

These are questions that he probably thought Twitter had cleared up a long time ago.

Then there was the bombshell, “are you aware that the archbishop Vincent Nichols is very concerned that Twitter dehumanises a very important part of our social life?”. Despite the fact that – as Shane Richmond points out in the Telegraph –  Vincent Nichols didn’t mention anything about Twitter, this again is a classic case of a person attacking something that they have never used and don’t really understand.  Williams replied quite rightly arguing “I would say that anyone who says that isn’t really familiar with the service, because it’s about humans connecting with each other, and often in ways that they couldn’t otherwise. It’s the opposite of dehumanising as far as I’m concerned”.

Thankfully, the interview gave us one interesting snippet. London is now the biggest twitter-using city in the world. That is, the biggest local community using Twitter. If you’ve ever used Twitter and are connected to people within your city, you’ll probably know as well as I do, the fantastic connections it helps you to make, the inspiring knowledge sharing it allows for and the vibrant dialogue it encourages. And if that isn’t “rounded communication” I don’t know what is.

Thanks to @CharlesArthur for providing a transcript of the interview.

After a few tweets, for some misguided reason they thought that putting popular trending hashtags at the beginning of their tweet would be a good idea. This is usually done by spammers so that people searching for a popular keyword such as iphone will see their message. And so, Habitat began sending out identical tweets with hashtags such as #Apple and #iPhone at the beginning. From the looks of it, this carried on for about 8 Tweets.

Yes, it was misguided, yes it was a mistake, but it does not have to be a big marketing disaster. It is certainly not up there with Motrin or Dominos disasters.

Habitat most probably gave their account to someone who knew very little about how Twitter works. I can’t imagine the decision to spam on an Iranian election hashtag was made by anyone particularly high up or with an ounce of sense at the company.

So what has gone wrong here and how can it be fixed?

Habitat have already pulled the offending tweets. Someone has obviously realised their (or someone elses) mistake and got rid of them. This is a start, and although bloggers are noting they can still be found in Twitter Search’s cache, they’re down on page 15 where no one is going to see them.

Habitat also appear to have thrown their hands up in the air and admitted their mistake stating “it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism… We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

I think this is the best thing they can do. Everyone makes mistakes in social media, as with anything, it is the only way we can learn and progress. It also goes to show the importance of strategising your social media apporach, as it can go so easily wrong.

There are endless blogs out there that advise on how best to use Twitter but I thought I’d add my two cents:

1. It is essential that a company gives an official Twitter account to someone that is already familiar with and using the service. This would not have happened if a seasoned Twitter user, that knows the etiquette had been given control of the account.

2. Engagement is more important than broadcasting offers. Twitter should be a customer support and engagement tool first and a marketing device second.

3. Give your Twitter followers something extra. No one wants to hear offers being constantly repeated that they can read about on the brand’s website in the first place.

4. Clearly define what you want to achieve with your Twitter account. Is Twitter the right tool for your brand? Jumping on the bandwagon is not the reason for beginning to use Twitter. Can you add something extra for your cutomers by using Twitter.

Twitter appear to finally be doing some interesting stuff with their search application. Twitter search was recently integrated into the home pages of all Twitter users. This meant that rather than having to go to search.twitter.com, users could search Twitter right from their home page.

The latest news is that Twitter are working on crawling the links that people post in their tweets. Cnet Webware reported yesterday that Twitter search, which in the past only indexed the text of tweets, will begin to index the pages that people are linking to on Twitter.

This is a big development as it will begin to make Twitter Search a more complete search engine and more on par with Google. In the past, Twitter search was fantastic to searching what people are talking about, but it was not particularly great for finding useful content; however, Twitter Search may have the one up on Google as their search engine is real time. So you will be finding content that people are talking about then and there.

Twitter are also planning on taking into account reputation ranking in Twitter Search. This will mean that when you search for a particularly talked about trend in Twitter, Cnet point out, “Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that”.

This will be an interesting addition. Currently Twitter search just shows results based by time, and nothing else. When reputation comes into it, arguably you will get more relevant results.

Twitter have not said how they will rank reputation though. It may be something similar to Twitter Grader; basing reputation on number of followers and number of friends, as well as amount of retweets and conversation frequency.

It is unclear whether results from people with a higher reputation will give us more relevant results. Take the Schiphol disaster as an example. We could end up just seeing what Stephen Fry said about something, and that might not be as relevant as seeing results from people that were actually at Schiphol whitnessing the event. Hopefully Twitter will take things like this into account.

The new interface is being tested on a random number of accounts before they roll it out to the rest of us. Or, in Twitter’s words ‘once a bunch of us have kicked the tires a bit’.

Not only does the new search box incorporate into your home page, it also features a trending drop down that shows you the hot trends people are talking about.

Twitter search has been such an important and useful feature of the site for so long and I’m surprised it’s taken so long for Twitter to incorporate it in the home page. When ever you want to know what is being said about someone or something on Twitter, search is a fantastic tool to get an instant insight. It is also a great way to find new people to follow.

Despite how useful Twitter search is, there are a multitude of other tools that fill in the gaps where Twitter Search falls down. TweetVolume is a fantastically simple tool that allows you to compare the amount of mentions of any term in Twitter. Twist gives you a line graph showing the amount of mentions of a term over time and Monitter allows you to compare mentions of a particular term in real time.

And because we’re all narcissists in social media, TweetStats and Twitter Grader are wonderful ways to reassure us that being number 37,334 out of 1,323,857 on Twitter actually means something.

Last night, bigmouths Andrew Girdwood, Wendy Rees and myself went along to the EdTwestival at Hawk and Hunter which was attended by nearly 250 other Twitterers from all around Scotland (and beyond). As well as getting an opportunity to meet the people we’ve been following and communicating with on Twitter, there was some excellent music from Peter Gregson, Epic26 and Plum as well as some entertaining compering from Ewan Spence.

But most importantly, the Twitterers at EdTwestival managed to raise around £3400 for charity:water. Doing our bit to help the Twestival total towards its $1m target.

As well as the mass of Twittering going on during the night heliping to raise the profile of EdTwestival, BBC Scotland came along on the night and gave the event a fantastic write up

Pictures from the night’s shenanigans can be found on Flickr.

Although user stats for Twitter are hard to come by, recent estimates by Google engineer DeWatt Clinton suggest that between 5m and 5.5m accounts have been created on Twitter since it’s launch; however, only 1.5-1.6m users have gone back to post again after they first created their account. Of these, Clinton estimates Twitter has 1.2-1.3m active and connected users.

StumbleUpon doesn’t state how many of their 7m users are active and connected, but 7m users is still a great deal more than 5m. Considering the large amount of mainstream press and hype Twitter has been receiving of late, it is surprising that people still don’t hail StumbleUpon in a similar manner. Even in the web marketing community.

The benefits of StumbleUpon for marketing are vast. If relevant, interesting content is submitted to the right categories, StumbleUpon has the potential to refer large amounts of traffic over a long period of time. As Amit Chowdhry notes, this is much more beneficial that the huge, one off spike that Digg or Reddit can send.

The benefits of StumbleUpon for the user however, are even greater. StumbleUpon adds serendipity to your web surfing that simply searching for content and clicking on links doesn’t. It’s been compared to watching TV, although adding much more to the user experience than TV does.

Aside from pressing the “random article” button in Wikipedia, it wasn’t easy to just stumble across something you weren’t looking for on the web before StumbleUpon, and still, it was highly likely you would get something that wouldn’t interest you. StumbleUpon ensures you get content that will.

It’s curious why people don’t talk about StumbleUpon more; news reference volume is vastly higher for Twitter than for StumbleUpon. Maybe it is because you don’t see celebrities using StumbleUpon. However, it cannot be ignored. 7m users with a fraction of the publicity Twitter has received shows that it is a stayer and is only going to get bigger.

A quick grab into the twitter ether and you will find @bobbyllew (Robert Llewellyn aka Kryton from Red Dwarf) @StephenFry, @JohnCleese, @JackDee, @JeremyClarkson and @wossy (aka Jonathan Ross) to name a few.

As the Guardian report, @wossy has been busying himself with twitter while on his “break” from the BBC. He’s been asking his twitter followers what record he should play on his first radio show back, tweeting about smoking cigars and buying Simon Cowell a bra from Victoria’s secret.

But recently he’s turned to investigative journalism in his latest endeavour to bust boredom by calling up his celebrity buddies to find out if they are actually who they say they are on twitter. First target was @JackDee when Ross tweeted:

“i dont think @jack dee is real jack. he’s not very computery. I’ll call him tomorrow an d ask if you like.”

A few hours later came the tweet:

“Just got off the phone with Jack dee,. Current jack Dee on twitter is NOT bloke off the telly. But I think he will start an account“

At this, the twitosphere called for him to unmask @Jeremy_Clarkson, and so came the tweet:

“Just called Clarkson but his phone is switched off. Lucky b****rd is probably working.”

a few hours later he twittered:

“It’s not Clarkson. He responded with the very straightforward “Not on Twitter”. Unlike me he has more important things to do !!”

But then his unmasking seemed to jump up and bite him as his twitter followers began to question his authenticity, causing Ross to tweet:

“Hi It is me but proving it is dull. Feel free not to f ollow ! J “

All this impersonating brings back the ago old internet problem of domain name squatting. If brands don’t act quickly and claim their twitter name, as twitter rises in popularity, they could be victims of twitter impersonation too.

UPDATE: Jonathan Ross has now proven he is the real deal with this piece of infallible evidence. Thanks to @giagia for providing link.

According to the company blog, Pownce will shut down the website as of December 15th.

Pownce has always been dubbed as a Twitter competitor, despite Pownce having a few bonus features not available on the Twitter service. Pownce, unlike its competitor, allowed users to share photos, music and videos, while Twitter continues to allow users to simply post messages and urls.

Why have Six Apart bought the service only to shut it down? It looks like Six Apart may not see a future in Pownce but do see a future in its creators.

Pownce may have fallen to Twitter, but Twitter still has to find a way to make money and unless it finds a way soon the service may find itself going the way of Pownce.

Twitter, along with many other social media sites are leading the way in delivering the latest news, the thousands of users creating an army of journalist, many updating live from the source using a mobile phone. Now many newspapers are realising they simply can’t compete, and the NYTimes is calling for photos and eye witness accounts of what is happening.

More than just headlines and latest reports, some of the Tweets were very personal such as one message which said; “Emergency’ can some one check if there bomb blast of some shootout in Oberoi hotel of anywhere in Mumbai? I am at Inox inside”[sic]. Another Tweet encouraged people to give blood, letting users know which hospitals had a shortage.

While Twitter has been given a lot of credit for providing live news on the event, many other web 2.0 sites played a huge part as well. Flickr, for example, had many photos uploaded taken live from the scene, giving users a real eye-witness account into what was actually happening, while a Google map was used to update people on where the attacks had occurred. Facebook, on the other hand was used by citizens in the main attack area to update friends and family that they were ok via the status feed.

One blog which deserves a mention is mumbaihelp which gave information on hospitals and emergency relief within the Bombay area, as well as informing others where they could donate blood.

While, Twitter has been very useful as a news source throughout the conflict, it is important to remember that live Tweets are not verified and it is important to think about what the consequences of Tweeting certain information could mean.