Report Finds Deep South Was Epicenter of Election Day "Hate" Tweets

One historic aspect of this year's presidential election was the first re-election of an African-American chief executive. Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2008, one wondered whether he would be one-term president, or even be alive to complete a first term. Race was always hanging around this presidency, and certainly so during the 2012 election campaign. Obama v. Romney included offensive episodes such as Donald Trump's repellent, insulting $5 million dollar offer for the 44th president to produce his college records. In this case, we're talking about a doubting a president who was a Harvard Law grad.

While few people told pollsters they were voting against Obama simply because he was a brother, racism was unquestionably a factor Democrats and Republicans took into account in certain states. However, evidence of articulated racism is a little tricky to identify.

According to a story appearing in today's online edition of the LA Times, during the final days of the election period, and Election Day itself, some academic researchers "analyzed 'hate' tweets by geography." The results: Alabama and Mississippi led the pack in this shameful category, with many states of the former Confederacy following close behind.

It's an interesting story, and one that won't vanish after January 20, 2013.

While Jack Welch Dumps Fortune Magazine, Reuters Dumps Welch

In the media story of the week, former GE boss Jack Welch committed what in baseball would be considered running oneself into a double play.

Jack Welch
(photo from Reuters)

Welch jump started the action late last week. He was upset that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produced an unemployment statistic that was highly favorable to President Obama's re-election efforts. Suspicious of the stat's timing, Jumpin' Jack reached for his Twitter account and released a highly critical tweet. His innuendo about Chicago politics and his assertion that the BLS cooked the numbers gained attention for all the wrong reasons. The BLS bureaucrats, whose reputation as being beyond political reach was confirmed by former George W. Bush administration members, came across as blameless. Meanwhile, Welch came across as an arrogant asshole and a witless shill for Mitt Romney.

Well, the empire has struck back against Welch. A story in today's Chicago Tribune notes that Welch and his wife, who co-write a column for Fortune, have parted ways with the magazine. The Welch camp has spun this direction as something of their own choosing. At the same time, Reuters simply dumped Welch.

Once upon a time, this could never have happened to Welch. He and GE carefully cultivated his mystique during General Electric's high-flying days. At that time, GE owned NBC and no one wanted to tangle with the firm's clout. Wall Street analysts shamefully gave GE a golden pass, even though most publicly acknowledged its finances were an unfathomable black box. Welch himself was lionized by a fawning media as a fiscal wizard, while GE managers were considered corporate America's A-team. Their place was subsequently taken over by Goldman Sachs, whose time in the sun is beginning to come to a close.

For Welch to utter his suspicions about the BLS took chutzpah. These remarks came from a man who manipulated GE's performance figures over the years, who "managed" the media so that unwanted questions were rarely asked (and even more rarely answered), and whose firm required a federal bailout after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

I suppose a better question than Welch's being dropped from the media's varsity teams is why Fortune and Reuters kept him as long as they did.

Social Media Firms Unplug Their Telephone Customer Service

One aspect of the technology "revolution" is its nearly religious belief that greater efficiency leads to a greater good. This largely unquestioned perspective has created commercial drives in which individual users become data points rather than living, breathing human beings. When a tech firm's system doesn't work, does not adequately serve a user's legitimate expectations, or leaves a user puzzled, what happens?

Well, don't expect social media or search engine customer service over the phone, according to a story buried in slow-news Saturday editions of The New York Times, Reporter Amy O'Leary's useful article details how tech's titans disdain offering any telephone service at all. Instead, users are typically directed to a relevant website, where supposedly they will find succor from the service providers.

The delicious irony in the story is O'Leary's attempts to get firms to speak on the telephone for comment on her piece. "Officials at Facebook, Google and Twitter (all reached first by e-mail) say their users prefer to go online, finding it more pleasant and efficient than wading through a phone tree."

Ah, but social media business development is much more important than the "user experience." As Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane noted to O'Leary, the social media firms have "paved the way in large-scale customer service by keeping everything online." However, while social media and search engine firms' ambitions are certainly "large-scale," they have carefully considered how to "small scale" customer service expectation and interaction with a human being to its logical vanishing point.

Mikkel Svane
(photo from Twitter)

In tech's world view, absolutely nothing can be permitted to distract the enterprise from its focus. That includes interactions with human beings, who have an annoying tendency to act out of sync with algorithmically estimated probabilities of behavior. The Times story slyly makes this point by going inside the belly of the data-driven beast:

"In Foursquare's offices in New York, phone calls are considered a distraction to the developers and are conducted away from the main work area, in British-style red phone booths, the company's spokeswoman said, explaining that calls are not part of developer culture."

They aren't part of social media's arrogant perspective on service culture, either.

Report: Women Form Majority of Social Media Users

An item in today's Ideas@Innovations blog in The Washington Post observes that more than 50% of social media users are female. Some other findings: women are the majority of Pinterest advocates and, surprisingly, game players. Nearly three of every five Twitter users are women, something I would not have guessed. The report also notes how social media has become a primary conduit for family information. That finding would imply social media's use by older age groups, as the swamping of Facebook with baby picture posts would amply suggest.

However, some things don't change: females form a decided minority of LinkedIn users. The world of work continues to interest males more than the Pinterest proposition of sharing thoughts about the nest with "like-minded individuals".

Judge Rules Twitter Must Provide Tweets, IP Addresses to Prosecutors

Malcolm Harris

Earlier this week, a New York criminal court judge ruled that Twitter was compelled to release user information to prosecutors. In the ruling, the Manhattan DA won the right to access a user's tweets, IP address, saved and deleted messages, and other information that could possibly identify a user's location at specific points in time.

The defendant, Malcolm Harris, is charged with disorderly conduct stemming from Occupy Wall Street activities.

Twitter fought the court order to compel disclosure.

The story was reported in arstechnica.com, Talking Points Memo, and the San Jose Mercury News, and other media outlets.

Twitter's Transparency Report Notes Government Requests for Information

Twitter just released something called the "Twitter Transparency Report." The statement includes the number of requests from various world governments for "user information" and "to withhold content". The winner in this grim sweepstakes is none other than the United States. Of the 849 requests around the world, Washington generated 679 -- 75% -- of them. If you throw in Japan's 98 requests, that leaves the remainder of the world with 5% of the requests.

The announcement is quite interesting and, in a way, provocative. Thanks to the financial blog zerohedge.com for alerting its readers to the Twitter initiative.

Tweeting for the Lord

Amy O'Leary
(photo from Salt Institute for Documentary Studies
and Public Radio Exchange)

I have a theory that the Saturday news contains the juiciest stories. Often, the articles involve dirt or unpleasant PR someone either wants public or desperately wants buried. Occasionally, a feature pops up in which a trend begins to surface. Such is the case with a story in today's online edition of The New York Times. Reporter Amy O'Leary wrote an excellent, imaginative piece on how Christian organizations use Twitter to spread prayers and other messages to its user community.

One delicious observation in O'Leary's piece is how Biblical verses fit the 140-character limit for tweets. Not only do the verses come in under the Twitter bar, there's room for hash tags. This fortunate combination is made to order for the successful creation of tweets. Also, knowing the message gets to a defined community of like-minded users makes Twitter a powerful, compelling tool to spread one's religious messages.

The Christian communities have traditionally possessed their own means of communication. They have bypassed mainstream media and do their best to ignore it. The fact is the Christians don't need and don't want big-time media around, unless it's their own outlets. In a way, the Internet revolution played right into the Christian movement's hands. O'Leary's article brought that point home, ironically using the very tip of the secular media spear -- the front page of The New York Times -- the Christian world has long avoided and regarded with suspicion.

My Encounter with Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston
(photo from the Washington Post)

Earlier this evening, I attended a reading at Freerange, a New York venue for writers to read from work that has typically already been published. This is my second visit to the monthly event. Some work appeals to me; some of it doesn't. That's okay, as I believe experiencing authors' voices (literally and figuratively) offers enriching value that one can't get sitting on the sofa.

What made tonight a little different for me was that I won a Freerange raffle prize: a copy of Baratunde Thurston's new book How to Be Black. (I thought it was ironic, given that Don Cornelius, whose show Soul Train offered a window into popular African-American culture, died today.) The author read from his work, so I got a preview of what I'd just won. Later, I was encouraged to have the book autographed. That action was out of character for me, as I don't like author signings. However, since Thurston's autograph had some legitimate personal context, I walked up to him and he signed the book.

I didn't understand why he was wearing orange sneakers and an orange scarf on an unseasonably warm night, but it didn't matter. Then again, he didn't question why I wore a black shirt, black pants, black socks, and black shoes. After all, we were in New York's Lower East Side.

Later, I read today's Washington Post story on DC-born Thurston, conveniently dovetailed with the release of his book.

Quite possibly the most unusual observation of the Freerange event was watching a woman write notes by hand and then use her phone to tweet a report of the event for her Twitter following. Think of it as instant journalism: type 140-characters, add interest, stir lightly.

Internet Firm Sues Former Employee Over Migration of His Twitter Followers

Just who or what "owns" a Twitter following? This question is one of social media's stickier wickets. The obvious answer might revolve around interpretations of non-compete contract language and definitions of intellectual property. However, as an article in today's siliconvalley.com implied, it's not always that simple. The story notes some intriguing details that those interested in the business side of social media should carefully consider. (For the record, the story appears to have chased the tail of an article by John Biggs in The New York Times on Christmas Day.)

The case involves Noah Kravitz, a former employee of the Internet news and review firm PhoneDog. He left the company to start his own enterprise. Kravitz's new venture allegedly used Twitter account information gained from his work with PhoneDog. Significantly, the plaintiffs in the case, in their court filings, attributed a monetary value to each Twitter account associated with the defendant. In this instance, each Twitter account was worth $2.50 per month. That's right -- two dollars and fifty cents. An intellectual property lawyer quoted in the siliconvalley.com piece doubted the figure would stand up to legal scrutiny. However, it does beg the larger question of how to sensibly value social media user information.

Two-fifty doesn't sound like much, until it's multiplied by the number of Twitter accounts associated with the firm's efforts. In its litigation, PhoneDog asserted the defendant had 17,000 Twitter followers per month. The term in dispute was eight months. The total figure comes to what a Ferrari might cost.

Auric Goldfinger, from the James Bond movie Goldfinger

The legal activity suggests there's gold to "monetize" in them thar' social media hills. (In fairness, Kravitz's Twitter site includes the slogan "People are not property. Love over gold.") There's also anxiety among bloggers, as vator.tv correspondent Krystal Peak noted, about the fate of their "curated Twitter followings."  These considerations lead one to wonder about the gold being mined by some of the Internet's leading transaction firms and what it's worth. Do you think $2.50 per "follower" sounds like the right value? What is your social media worth?

Steve Jobs Passing and Impact on Twitter, Google Search Traffic Flow, Info Management

It's no secret that the Internet was awash with activity in the minutes, hours, and days after the announcement of Steve Jobs' passing. The interesting firm searchengineland.com has provided a useful, interesting summary of that online action, and their summaries of Twitter and Google Search traffic are worth reading. (Thanks to Bambi Francisco Roizen's vator.tv for linking the information to its membership.)

A few takeaways from searchengineland.com's posts will whet your appetite for further exploration:
1. Twitter: Jobs' passing did result in a traffic spike (no surprise). More amazing are the other, mostly celebrity and sports related announcements that drew more tweets per second than Jobs' RIP announcement.
2. Google Search: how Google (and Yahoo) handled the trending is very fascinating, as it reveals both firms' ability to "manage" information awareness. It also highlights search's dark side as a means for the unscrupulous to distribute spam and malware.

In essence, Danny Sullivan and the searchengineland.com gang offer an unusual look behind the tech curtain. The links to the stories I noted go to searchengineland.com's free site; the company also offers a "premium" site restricted to paid subscribers. (Full disclosure: I don't work for the firm, I have no business relationship with them, and I'm not a subscriber to their paid service.)

What's The Ugliest Intersection in Your Community?

The LA Times ran a brief piece inspired by a Twitter tweet (welcome to the second decade of the 21st Century). The tweet, placed by writer/editor Kurt Andersen, was inspired by a Los Angeles intersection he happened to be passing through. While Andersen's body of work is not to my taste, the question he posed (in more ways than one) got my attention. Most people can quickly formulate an opinion about ugly crossroads. Framing the proposition in terms of local perspective gives Anderson's question some juice and context. The opportunity to share this pointless information is just plain fun, admittedly at the expense of an unfortunate intersection.

You're welcome to comment and include a photo or other image of an offensive intersection. My contribution is the Tonnelle Circle in Jersey City. The accompanying photo only hints at how hideous this abomination is. However, you'll want to catch this while you can, as a massive public works project is eliminating some of the more egregiously ugly and dangerous aspects of this intersection.