Twitter and A Flock of Seagulls, Publishing in a Networked World

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?).

These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on.

The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces and fits and starts through the social network of friends, family, colleagues. The network is the world of social publishing.

Why? Because it is to difficult to find works online among billions of documents and uncounted trillions of ever expanding words. You just can search for things you do not know exist. The social network trades in attention, which is necessary to discover what exists, through your social contacts.

It just does not make sense to "publish" a work to a certain location (or a physical book), then try to get everyone to come read it through clever marketing. It makes no sense to prevent copying, since copies are the method by which information spreads through a social network. The idea of scarcity and exclusivity makes no sense at all in a socially networked world, unless by exclusive you mean being friends with the author.

The network, by the way, does not really need to worry about this issue of citation, since there is usually a trail back to the original author, through a 'retweet path' (if dutifully or automatically maintained) or through carrying authorship information with the work through the social network (as I've talked about here before).

As a poet, nearly every poem I write is immediately published to the social network, so I can't give anyone "first rights" to it, and moreover, that is meaningless. I noticed the Haiku Society of America states, at least for some submissions, " The appearance of poems in online discussion lists or personal Web sites is not considered publication." a much more adaptive policy.

What happens on Twitter is more like a flock of seagulls, making all references to publication, first publication, second publication utterly meaningless, as we tweet to others and they tweet back at us, retweeting and retweeting. I suppose the next thing, is they will want "first tweet" rights. I understand the goal is to keep your publication fresh, but that simply does not fit reality. It says something about a publishing world where the consumer needs to be reassured they are not being "cheated" by recieving old goods, which are turned over from elsewhere, similar to the way "shovelware" became a problem in the 1990s CDROM publishing era. I suppose the same problem exists with bloggers, twitterers, who merely repeat what others write, but I just don't see the problem. In a network world it costs nothing to unfollow or unfriend a source.

Quick-slow: A way to give meaning to media?

I develop the platform for the folkstreams.net website, which is a non-profit archive for rare folklore documentary films. We transfer the films to video and then stream them to the web so they are not lost, molding in some archive never to be seen. Many of our films have not been seen for twenty years or more, one was rescued from a barn. As such, we are strong advocates of open access to archives (and I am happy to learn many other institutions in the folklore world also understand how important access is to a sustainable archive and are using the web in wonderful ways).

To the point. It has always been important for our films to be presented in context. I have always believed that media without context is meaningless, whether that is a family photograph or a documentary film. A photographic image is merely an interesting composition without the information necessary to understand it, to interpret it. All images must be read...oddly enough, since they are the seeming opposite of text, which everyone acknowledges must be read. We teach literacy, but we don't teach the equivalent for images. (What would that be imagacy, photoacy, videocy? That last one sounds too much like idiocy to be comfortable.). A photographic image may affect us as a work of art, or it may present an attractive composition, but beyond that it requires context. The same is true for moving pictures. This is why each film on our website is nestled in a set of contextual materials. I sometimes doubt that many people read them, or read the transcript, but they are there to give meaning to the films, to place them in context so that people may better understand the subjects and ideas presented in the film.

I've wanted for some to build a small content management system where

* Media is on an equal footing with text, but also where media is the centerpiece.
* Media is as easy to work with and place in context as working with text in a wiki.

There is a form, a mashup you might call it, between a Blog and a Wiki, called a Bliki. I had not paid too much attention to this development until I read on one of the advocate's websites that the idea of a Bliki involved a "quick-slow" process. The blog enables a user to quickly write a blog entry, something quick, potentially ephemeral and tied to time; At that moment or any time later, the user may also create a wiki page connected to the blog entry, for slower moving, more thoughtful and persistent content.

I think this would apply perfectly to such a media application, which would be useful in personal publishing and could help small archives (local history and genealogy societies, libraries and archives) manage and create access to their image collections. As volunteers scan images, they could upload them with descriptions as blog entries, then they or others could provide context through wiki pages associated with the image meta data in the blog entries. It would be upload, give a title and description, later come back, drop a wikiname in the description and then create a page. It could encourage local people to contribute memories to photographs, for example.

Today, I actually came across the first example in the wild of someone doing this, someone using the Bliki "quick-slow" philosophy to give meaning to images. "I added Wikipedia links to my Flickr photos..." (http://instones.org/archives/61 2007) This is exactly the kind of behavior I would like a web application to enable and encourage, which would facilitate quick image upload and meta data, but would also enable and encourage placing media in context, as well as supporting tagging for folksonomy. It's more a philosophy than a technology.