Media
Media
The Death of Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/12/2009 - 17:46Today, I saw two reports presenting very different views on the imminent death of Twitter. The first is from people noting that sites like Compete.com are reporting Twitter’s growth was essentially flat. The second is that soon, Twitter will pass two to the thirty-first tweets, which is the largest signed integer. Anyone who is storing information about tweets using signed integers is likely to crash sometime on Saturday.
It was just seven months ago that Twitter passed its billionth tweet. So, is Twitter really slowing down, or is there something else going on? Looking at sites that track the number of visits to the Twitter Website, it does appear to be slowing down. However, as people start following more and more people, keeping track of tweets on Twitter becomes more and more difficult, and people start using tools like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Looking at traffic on these sites can also be misleading as people download applications to view their tweets.
So, what can the impending Twitpocalypse tell us? Looking at the number of Tweets per day, the trend is still up, sharply, even during the ‘flat’ month of May.
This illustrates one of the problems with metrics in a Web 2.0 world. Page impressions, and all the metrics around page impressions mean less and less. With Web 2.0, information from one site is displayed on other sites, and what you need to look at is the underlying API traffic, sort of like the number of Tweets per day.
From the bigger picture, I believe that we are seeing just another example of what goes on with technology adoption. Back in 2007, I wrote about a reporter at ad:tech who “was surprised to hear that twitter was still around and active”. In my blog post about the Technology Adoption Curves and the Twitter Lifecycle I commented, “As the innovators go out and try to convince people of a really cool new technology, and the early adopters start piling on, the laggards hear about this and try to convince everyone else that there isn’t really any value to the cool new technology.”
A group psychologist, who isn’t on Twitter yet, as far as I know, was commenting about Twitter on a mailing list and suggested as a tweet from him, “Adapting and resisting – two sides of the same coin”. Perhaps that sums up some of the discussion about the death of Twitter in less than 140 characters.
Over the coming months, I am sure that we’ll see many more blog posts about Twitter’s demise. They are likely to be partly right. What we see as Twitter today and the realtime microblogging of the future may look considerably different.
Likewise, I suspect that people that said that horseless carriages were a passing trend were right. The model T looks considerably different from today’s hybrids.
(Originally published at DigidayDaily.)
Exploring the Death Penalty: The case of Richard Roszkowski and Holly and Kylie Flannery
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/11/2009 - 20:13Last week in Bridgeport, the trial of Richard Roszkowski, convicted of two counts of capital felony and three counts of murder entered the penalty phase. If he is given the death penalty, he will become the 11th person on death row in Connecticut. The same week, Gov. Rell vetoed a bill to repeal the death penalty in Connecticut.
Gov. Rell’s veto was covered by hundreds of news stories. Dr. Petit, whose wife and two daughters were brutally murdered has received a lot of press. Mr. Roszkowski’s trial received by but a few stories.
People have suggested that this illustrates the uneven application of the death penalty. The murder of the wife and daughters of a doctor gains much more notoriety than the murder of the girlfriend of a career criminal and her daughter.
One trial lawyer, upon hearing about my interested in the death penalty suggested that I attend some of the trial and perhaps provide additional coverage. So, today, I attended part of the hearing. Read on to get my experience.
Tinkering with Students’ Lives
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/29/2009 - 17:49
In December 1965, a thirteen year old student wore a black armband to school to protest the Vietnam war. It was a small act, and did not lead to any immediate de-escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. She probably didn’t expect her arm band to end the war, but she also probably didn’t expect it to change her life, and the life of others that way it did.
Four years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the school violated Ms. Tinker’s First Amendment Freedom of Speech when they sent her home for wearing that armband.
Last night, she spoke at the ACLU of Connecticut’s Milton Sorokin Symposium, “Students and Schools Pushing the Limits of Free Speech”. The evening started off with Justice Richard N. Palmer presenting the 2009 First Amendment Essay Contest winners. These students had written essays on the topic, “In what circumstance should a school be able to punish students for their speech off campus?”
The evening was moderated by Laurie Perez of Fox 61 News who has written about the Doninger case and noted that this case is the most searched item on the Fox 61 News website.
Many lawyers seemed star struck to be in the presence of a plaintiff of such an important Supreme Court case. What sort of message would Ms. Tinker deliver? How had the event changed her life? What were the influences that led her to wearing the arm band on that fateful day, and what had her life turned out to be like forty years later?
Ms. Tinker spoke about her father being a Methodist minister and how she had been brought up with the exhortation to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. She spoke about moving out of one town because of her father’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement and dinner time discussions about her parents’ experiences going to register voters in the south in 1964.
She commented that “That’s the sort of person I want to be, to stand up for what is right”, and spoke about the importance of telling stories not only about Cinderella, but also about brave people who stood up for what they believed in.
Clearly, her parents’ simple acts of courage had a hand in shaping her life, as did her experiences with the famous lawsuit. She became a nurse and works mostly with trauma patients; gunshots, knifings, and accidents. She spends her free time going from one event to another, trying to help students find their voices, to stand up for themselves, and to lead the way to a better world.
She spoke as a nurse, recognizing that one of the most important things a student can do for their long term health is graduate from high school. She spoke about advocating for ‘democratic schools’ and noted that a punitive approach to education, especially regarding what happens beyond the school yard gate drives students away from schools. She talked about the problems with the school to prison pipeline.
In many ways, her talk could be summed up in the simple words she often tells students, “You are going to make history with your small actions or inactions”. As she spoke, I thought of a different quote from Robert Kennedy:
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
Her parents sent forth a tiny ripple of hope, it crossed the ripple of hope she and her fellow students sent out, it now crosses the ripples of hope sent out by the students whose lives she has touched as she goes around the country encouraging students to speak up.
After she spoke, Patrice McCarthy, Deputy Director and General Counsel for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education spoke. It must be following such a powerful speaker, but Ms. McCarthy held her own and her remarks and the question and answer period deserve their own post.
So, I put up my blog posts and wonder what sort of effect my small actions might make. I wonder about the actions of other bloggers I visit online. We may never see the effect of our actions the way Ms. Tinker has, but we should all keep to our little actions and our hopes for a better world.
Google Adword Trademarks: Stratton Faxon and The Coalition of Immokalee Farm Workers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/27/2009 - 21:21The Connecticut Law Tribune has a current article about the law firm Stratton and Faxon suing Google over the rights to their name. A marketing firm working on behalf of Silver, Golub & Teitell, a Stamford based law firm, apparently bought the adwords. The article reports that Michael Stratton has said they are “going to sue Google and ... ask the Connecticut Bar Association for an ethics opinion.”
The article states, “The Stratton Faxon complaint against Google alleges tortious interference with a business relationship, violation of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, and unjust enrichment, on grounds that Google pays nothing for selling the Stratton Faxon name.”
It is an interesting approach to an ongoing legal issue. Last year, Ars Technical had an article about Rescuecom, a computer repair firm which sued Google in 2004 “for allowing competitors to purchase advertisements that would appear when a user conducted a search for the keyword ‘rescuecom.’” That case was dismissed by a Federal Judge in 2006, been appealed and is now heading towards trial.
In that case, the Electronic Freedom Foundation filed a brief of Amicus Curiae in support of Google. In their introduction, they argue:
Submit the search term “McDonald’s” to Google’s search engine and among the “sponsored links” that appear in response you may encounter a link for “The Coalition of Immokalee Farm workers,” a community-based organization that supports the rights of low-wage workers in Florida. The Coalition was recognized recently in the national news for leading a successful boycott of the restaurant chain Taco Bell that resulted in improved wage and working conditions for tomato pickers in the Taco Bell supply chain… Recently, the Coalition turned its attention to McDonald’s practices and, as part of its public campaign for working condition and wage improvements, decided to purchase sponsored links on Google to help stimulate public debate and mobilize support.
This is an example of the important free speech activity that search engines help facilitate. It is also an example of the kind of Constitutionally-protected activity that would be disrupted were this Court to adopt the arguments urged by Appellant Rescuecom.
I strongly support the position of EFF on the Rescuecom case and believe their argument applies very well in the Stratton Faxon case. In April 2006, the advertising firm Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC brought a law suit against Lance Dutton of the “Maine Web Report”. Mr. Dutton had been publishing a series of articles criticizing Warren Kremer and the Maine Department of Tourism.
The Citizen Media Law Project reports that “Warren Kremer voluntarily dismissed the suit after a month, after facing extensive criticism on blogs and websites.” Part of that criticism was an adwords campaign that I purchased from Google. People searching on “Warren Kremer Paino Advertising” would find a paid advertisement for my blog which I described as “Orient Lodge: Poking fun at stupid advertising firms”. I wrote about the case in a blog post entitled The way life shouldn’t be.
While many much more notable bloggers wrote much more eloquently about the case, I would like to think that my blog post and Google Adwords campaign highlighting my blog added at least a little bit to the extensive criticism on blogs and websites that led Warren Kremer to voluntarily dismiss the suit.
Should cases like the Rescuecom case, the Stratton Faxon case prevail and several others that are emerging, I believe it will be part of further eroding of free speech online.
I am not a lawyer and certainly am in no position to file a brief in any of these cases. Instead, I am a blogger, so I’ll share my ideas here and hope that saner minds prevail in the cases being considered.
(Cross-posted at Digiday:Daily.)
Enough about the Death Penalty
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/26/2009 - 11:06At one of the Memorial Day picnics I went to this weekend, a friend told me that Gov. Rell asked the Senate to suspend the normal rules and send the death penalty bill to her desk so she could veto it right away. I understand the feeling, many of us probably would have had much more pleasant Memorial Day Weekends, if we didn’t have to spend time thinking about those who have died and about if others should be killed. After all, Memorial Day is supposed to be a fun filled weekend kicking off the beginning of summer and not a time for thinking about difficult issues, right?
Instead, I went from one picnic to the next where a common topic was the death penalty. Perhaps it is the circles I move in, but no one at any of the picnic I attended supports the death penalty. I brought up some of the concerns that I had heard during the Senate debate about the death penalty, and the arguments that had been presented in favor of the death penalty were not considered persuasive. The closest that anyone came to supporting the arguments were to refer to former Gov. Cuomo of New York who was reputed to have said something to the effect that if a loved one of his was brutally murdered, he might also be inclined to sin, to do the wrong thing, and seek vengeance.
I spoke with a trial attorney at one party who talked about the two death penalty cases currently being considered in Connecticut. It seems as if everyone is well acquainted with the Cheshire home invasion case. It plays well to all of our fears. Dr. Petit and his family lived in a safe neighborhood where things like this aren’t supposed to happen.
Dr. Petit in his impassioned arguments for the death penalty referred those who commit heinous murder as animals. It is much easier to seek the death of a mere animal than a fellow human being that has transgressed what Dr. Petit calls the most sacrosanct law. If I, or the former Gov. Cuomo were in such a situation as Dr. Petit, we might write something similar.
Yet let’s look, for a moment at the other death penalty case currently being considered in Connecticut. On the morning of Sept. 7, 2006, Richard Roszkowski murdered 39-year-old Holly Flannery, 38-year-old Thomas Gaudet and 9-year-old Kylie Flannery. According to testimony, Mr. Roszkowski believed that he had cancer. He told a friend that “he wasn’t going out that way, but was going to shoot everyone he had grudges against and have the cops shoot him dead.” Ms. Flannery his first target. The night before the murders Mr. Roszkowski did “a lot” of cocaine and heroin.
Our culture is full of songs about murders of passion, and as I write this, a recording of one of many lover’s murder ballads comes on the radio. It seems as if we are more tolerant of murder when it takes place somewhere else, when it is tied up in poverty, drugs, and passion.
But what about Kylie Flannery, the fourth grader from Thomas Hooker School who saw her mother murdered, who tried to flee, was shot in the leg, and then later as she lay on the ground, shot in the head? Surely this will stir the emotions and convince a jury to give the death penalty.
According to the Connecticut Post, Public Defender Joseph Bruckmann announced that he planned “to present two mental health experts, one of them a nationally known opponent of the death penalty”. Senior Assistant State’s Attorney C. Robert Satti Jr. asked for the penalty portion of the trial to be postponed so that he would have “more time to confer with experts of his own so that he will be able to cross-examine the defense witnesses”. Perhaps, Richard Roszkowski will become the next Michael Ross, seeking his own death as an escape from death row.
I’ve spent this morning reading about the murder, the trial and those who mourn the death of Kylie Flannery. Friends are encouraging me to go to the trial and blog about it. The trial is currently schedule to start on Monday when I’ll be in Washington.
I don’t really want to go listen to the testimony. It seems like it would be too painful. No, it would be much easier to simply let the trial go on with minimal press coverage, just like it would have been easier if Gov. Rell had gotten a chance to veto the Death Penalty Bill on Friday and spared all of us, the introspection that these topics bring up. It would have been much easier if we could simply have gone and enjoyed watching the latest Terminator movie.
But sometimes, we are called to take the difficult course. Sometimes we have to think about grief, anger, vengeance and what we aspire to be as human beings. Sometimes we must admit that we too are sinners and are drawn at times to take vengeance into our own hands.
No, I did not escape struggling with my own conscience about the death penalty. With the upcoming trials, I may not be able to. I pray that Gov. Rell does not find an easy escape from her own conscience either.
