Liminal states

Clay’s post The failure of #amazonfail admits that over the weekend, he jumped to conclusions,  “believed things that weren’t true” about Amazon and was “intoxicated” by the hashtag.  He now thinks he was wrong.  Most of the post is written in the first person plural, assuming everybody else reacted as he did.  He concludes that “we” should apologize to Amazon.  Here’s my reply, originally posted as a comment.

Update: aemeliaclare says it far better than me on Barely and Widely, as does Mike Edwards. Many of the commenters in Clay’s thread have good things to say as well.  On Twitter, by contrast, the backlash is out in force, with many positive responses to “the great Shirky”.

Update on April 16: Janet D. Stemwedel’s Morality, outrage, and #amazonfail: a reply to Clay Shirky on Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Andrew Sempere’s Why Shirky Missed the Point on A repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what are two more examples of “saying it better than me”.  Nadia Cooke’s On the resolution of #amazonfail on The Ink Spectrum and Landon Bryce’s It’s Still On: The real failure of Amazonfail, Dubai, and Internet Outrage on Bookkake aren’t phrased as replies to Shirky, but make some very complementary points.

By contrast, Meg Pickard’s Spreading like wildfire: Twitter, Amazon and the social media mob focuses on what she sees as “ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk activity” on Twitter and sees it as “Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.”  Sigh.

My replies to Clay and Meg below the fold.

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Today, on Twitter, I saw another woman, Allyson Kapin (who goes by @WomenWhoTech), get frustrated when she saw a list of “top” folks in social media that, once again, omitted all but one woman…. Soon after, a discussion ensued, and, within minutes, Kapin started a new “event” on Twitter…

— Denise Graveline on The Eloquent Woman, February 25

The idea behind #Women2Follow Wednesdays is straightforward: to recognize and promote women in the technology and social media field — and help people find each other.  If you’re on Twitter, it’s easy to participate.

1. Tweet a list of one or more women on Twitter you think people should follow, along with some info about why.  Make sure to include the #women2follow hashtag!
2. Watch others’ recommendations and find interesting people to follow

Like I said, easy.  Here are my recommendations over the last three weeks.

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The great thing about the #digg it experiment (trying to use Twitter to increase visibility for progressives, feminists, and women of color on Digg), is that it’s so easy to explain to people*:

1. if you’ve got a story you’re trying to promote on Digg, include the #digg hashtag when you tweet it, and at least one of #p2, #rebelleft, #topprog, #fem2, or #woc
2. if you see something with the #digg hashtag, digg it if you think it’s interesting — and retweet it as well

The first round of experiments a few weeks ago went very well.  So last Friday we decided to try again, sending mail to a couple of progressive mailing lists encouraging people to digg and retweet.  Once again, the results were great.

Over 20 people have participated so far, and a total of 15 stories got tweeted with #digg and at least one of the progressive hashtags — most aggressively by Twitter user @diggleft.  Of these, give got at least one retweet.

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I wanted to expand on my remark in yesterday’s post about the gender ratio on #p2 staying “relatively well-balanced” with some statistics from the 24 hours ending at noon (Pacific time) today.  While this is only one data point — and over a weekend, too — it’s roughly in line with the other measurements I’ve been makingover the last week.

For about 80-90% of the people participating, it’s possible to able to infer the like gender of the tweeter based on self-descriptions (“mom” or “dad” for example), visual information, name, and so on.  Of course there’s room for error here,* so don’t treat this as gospel; and my apologies to anybody I inadvertently misclassified. Still, it’s enough to get some useful information.

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#p2 Twitterchat Monday (2/23), 6:30 PM Pacific/9:30 PM Eastern.  Tentative agenda here.  Feedback, please … and hope to see you then!

It’s been an encouraging first week for the new #p2 Twitter hashtag that Tracy Viselli and I proposed in The Exception last Friday.  Usage has steadily increased (more people, more tweets), especially after Sarah Granger’s #p2 Takes on the Progressive Twitter Challenge in techPresident on Monday.  The quality of information is generally very high, the gender ratio has stayed fairly well-balanced, and their have been lots of posts on race, lgbtq, an women’s issues.

We even have two of the candidates in the Democratic primary for Rahm Emmanuel IL-05 Congressional seat using it, with both @Quigley_Campaign and @Tom_Geoghan highlighting their progressive credentials.  A promising start!

Also, we set up a Wetpaint wiki last weekend, and while much of which is still in skeletal form, several people have already told me they’ve found the page discussing Twitter useful.   It’s got getting started and accessibility information, including a link to Dennis Lembrée’s Accessible Twitter; and a list of hashtags that are potentially useful for progressives.  Check it out at http://p2pt0.wetpaint.com/page/Twitter — and as always, feedback welcome.

Of course, there are unsurprisingly some growing pains as well.

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please digg, retweet, and follow on twitter

Update, 2:30 PM: please also digg and retweet the Nordstrom action alert

Update 4:30 PM: Jen Nedeau’s Can social media save the day? has more

Last Friday’s #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter experiment went remarkably well for a first attempt.  Here’s the data.

Two of the for posts sent to Twitter with a #digg tag got significant retweeting.  While it’s hard to know for sure, looking at the names of the diggers it seems that we were also getting some additional diggs via Twitter.  The table below also includes the total number of diggs as of 3 PM Pacific time on Friday

Eight retweets may not sound like a lot, But looking at it differently, those 8 retweets reached over 700 followers plus however many people are following the #topprog, #lgbt, and #jti* channels — and had a measurable impact on digg results.  According to retweetist popular URLs get retweeted by over 100 people in a 24 hour period so there’s clearly significant upside here.  And of course there are lessons about how to do it better.

Like I say, great results for a first attempt.

So let’s try it again!  Please digg and retweet.

And please also digg at least one of the first posts (1, 2, 3, 4).  While it’s too late to get any of them on to digg’s front page, this is still a very useful way of tracking how far this discussion has spread.  Thanks!

To follow along on Twitter, using the new improved magic incantation.*

Additional discussion, and a little more data, below the fold.

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DRAFT!  Revised version published on Reno and its Discontents.

Thanks all for the feedback.

And please, digg it!

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Update: #topprog Tweetup : Tuesday Night 7:30 EST : Subject – topprog.org features, functionality, and community. Please Retweet!  H/T @cacardinal

The new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives continues to make progress with a good range of topics and tweeters — including big names like @blogdiva, @PunditMom (who’s moderating a breakout session at fem2pt0 tomorrow), and @JoeTrippi.

The progressive blogosphere’s ignoring it, of course,* but the conservatives of #tcot are nervous enough that they’re already labelling it a #fail, thinking about flooding it, and coming up with euphemisms for trolling.  And in fact @The_Anti_Guru’s “active engagement” probably accounts for over 50% of the traffic, counting replies.  Guy attempts to disrupt and dominate conversation in potentially-woman-friendly-space, film at 11!

Gender issues aside, a lot of people are skeptical whether it’s possible to have meaningful conversations on Twitter.  Won’t the loudest voices drown everybody else out?  The three loudest tweeters yesterday had 46, 30, and 29 tweets yesterday.  As calibration, @drdigipol, aka Alan Rosenblatt, who as the creator of the list presumably has as much to say as anybody else, had 7.   So it’s easy to overlook @lizandra311’s updates on the Rootscamp in Philadelphia, or the occasional posts from @blogdiva, @Heardtfelt, @myrnyatheminx, @GetFISARight and others.

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It still bugs me that Steve Elliot’s Get FISA Right: Last Chance To Vote Against Domestic Spying was buried by pro-surveillance diggers after I foolishly twittered it to the #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) channel.  So when I got Alan Rosenblatt’s email about a new #topprog hashtag, my immediate response was that we should think about how to use it for information diffusion including posts that might be worth digging.  Not that I’m competitive or anything ….

Of course as Twitter Vote Report and the Motrin Moms have shown, Twitter hashtags are potentially useful for far more than that.  From the Get FISA Right perspective, for example, it’s another great way of broadcasting our dailyish update — and the same’s true for every other grassroots campaign out there.

One especially intriguing aspect of this to me is that Twitter is a far less male-dominated environment than digg, email and the blogosphere — and indeed the early posts to #topprog include @WomenWhoTech, @nerdette, @PunditMom, @myrnathemynx and many others.  So it’s a great chance for a key piece of progressive infrastructure where feminists and womanists — and women in general — can participate on a fairer basis.

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Katja Presnal’s Motrin Ad Makes Moms Mad

Motrin’s “viral” video making fun of babywearing mothers — timed for the start of International Babywearing Week — has, much to their PR firms amazement, led to a backlash.  As Allyson Kaplan’s Motrin’s Pain: Viral Video Disaster on Fast Company’s Radical Tech describes:

The viral video worked in the sense that it went viral but not in the way the marketers of Motrin were hoping for. Just hours after the campaign launched moms began blogging, tweeting and posting Facebook updates about how offensive the new Motrin campaign is to mothers. Women were so angered by the video that it became one of the most popular subjects tweeted about this weekend on Twitter. Talk about a PR disaster. Over 100 blogs featured headlines such as “Motrin Makes Moms Mad” to “Motrin Giving Moms a Headache”.

Tweets on Twitter are flying across the screen by the second using the hashtag #motrinmoms. Tweets read “RU FREAKING KIDDING ME? So many things wrong with that I don’t know where to start,” said @thecouponcoup. “I am shocked by that Motrin ad. Count me in on the boycott,” said @blondeblogger. “They totally do not get us at all,” said @DealSeekingMom.

Gosh.  Who’d a thunk it?

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I think I’ll let others tell the story for me …

September 25:

In collaboration with Harvard sociology graduate students Kevin Lewis and Marco Gonzalez, and with UCLA professor Andreas Wimmer and Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, Berkman Fellow Jason Kaufman has made available a first wave of Facebook.com data through the Dataverse Network Project.

The dataset comprises machine-readable files of virtually all the information posted on approximately 1,700 FB profiles by an entire cohort of students at an anonymous, northeastern American university.

— Tastes, Ties, and Time: Facebook data release, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

September 29:

The “non-identifiability” of such a dataset is up for debate….  According to the authors, the collection of the dataset was approved by the IRB, Facebook and the individual college.  The dissemination of the dataset appears to be approved by the IRB.

— Facebook Datasets and Private Chrome, Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures

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Update, September 18: $46,000 raised in 3 days!  Bitch lives!  See the comment for more …

via Jessica on Feministing:

Bitch magazine, the wonderful feminist publication, is in dire need of help. The past issue it put out may be its last if the mag doesn’t raise $40,000 by October 15.

That’s a lot of money – but with all the kick-ass feminists out there who know and love bitch, I’m betting it’s possible.

So please take a moment to watch this video of Debbie Rasmussen and Andi Zeisler explaining what’s going on, and consider donating here. I know I will be.

Me too … in fact, I already have. I’ve been a fan of their “feminist response to pop culture” for years, and we need to keep voices like that around.

Debbie’s post on Bitch’s blog gives more details …

And here’s the video: