Gadgets Blog » twitter

As a former reporter, I always hated the lack of flexibility in courtrooms for members of the media. I remember sitting in the courtroom for hours writing like a mad man to try and get the gist of the testimony, some great direct quotes and more.

It would have been much easier if I had a tape recorder; I could have used it and just went back over the tape later in the office. I understand the need for the unobtrusive nature of justice, and neither the defense nor the prosecution wants to have some stupid reason for a mistrial.

Things have suddenly gotten a little easier for reporters in Wales and England after an official proclamation that they can tweet court reporting live using silent portable devices. Reporters must first formally request the ability to use Twitter in every court case and then only if the device is silent and will not disrupt proceedings.

This is a major coup for reporters who would otherwise have to leave the courtroom periodically to live blog or tweet something outside and potentially miss important proceedings. The law is still rather new, and only time will tell how it will be used and abused. We reporters are fond of breaking or bending the rules as far as we can.

In the U.S., cell phones are not even allowed into courtrooms, at least in the ones I frequented as a reporter, so tweeting and messaging a court case is impossible. It will take sweeping changes in the sensibilities of the U.S. court system to allow such a law here in the states.

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Say what you will about the effects of the Internet on our society as a whole. If for nothing else, the Web is responsible for the era of pretty ridiculous company names. Branding is a vital part of a successful business in the 21st century, as countless online firms take aim at success. What differentiates one company from another? A catchy name certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s an idea that has given us some peculiar catch-phrases in our computer lingo. We “google” to find a term we want — from Armani jeans to cool lizards — we “wiki” to look up information on a topic — like Victoria’s Secret or World War II — and we “tweet” what’s on our minds.

Soon, perhaps, we will also be “blekking” in the realm of the Internet? Blekko is a new search engine that hit the market this week, as a part of a media-blitz instigated by the small startup. Traffic is an integral part of search engine revenue, because advertising dollars provide the essential link between users and a successful business model. But a new search engine seems to be a questionable call in the world of the Internet. Titans like Google and Bing already dominate the market share with a whole host of features and established user bases. So what makes Blekko so different? The answer is actually in your hands.

As the social networking world continues to buzz and expand at an exponential pace, the demands and expectations of the growing user base are becoming more and more essential to a site’s longevity. While few would have doubted the staying power of Twitter here in 2010, Evan Williams undoubtedly knows that coasting is the opposite of what one can do in this day and age. Millions now use the website, from celebrities to ordinary folks, and their presence on the Internet has been felt via the continuous stream of text and information coming from the site in the form of 160-character messages.

Twitter’s update, then, is intended to improve the experience and allow for greater integration of other parts of the website. Anyone familiar with Twitter knows its a bit of a language to acquire, and users have found their own way to use this language to incorporate other pieces of multimedia into their tweets. In an exciting announcement, the company revealed that deals had been struck with YouTube, Flickr, and 16 other multimedia sites to incorporate their content into Twitter itself. Instead of the single-page format used in the past, there are now two “panes” to the website, which will provide additional context to tweets users post.

NASA recently unveiled Robonaut 2, a human-looking robot that will do some of the mundane chores on the International Space Station, so the astronauts can focus on more important things. To celebrate the occasion, a Twitter account was created for Robonaut 2, affectionately called R2, and last time I checked it had more than 12,000 followers.

The first thing I thought of was Rosie the Space Maid just kicked my Twitter behind in a day. For writers, Twitter and social media in general are important tools to our success. We use them to promote ourselves and our work with the goal of our followers reading the pieces and upping the page views. Writers are active tweeters and try to cultivate as many followers as possible. It’s not unheard of to reach several thousand followers, but we lack the exposure or true “artists” like Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan.

When I broke the 700 mark on my Twitter account, I practically did a jig, sure it looked more like a spasm, but it was supposed to be a jig. It took weeks to get that number and it grows daily. I felt a little cheated when I heard that Robomaid received so many followers in a day especially since he can’t talk, has no emotions and looks like Boba Fett.

I’ll admit that the majority of the science in today’s breaking news article is a bit over my head, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the importance of the accomplishment. After several years of construction and preliminary testing, the Large Hadron Collider is finally serving its underlying purpose: making really really small things run into each other at really really high speeds. Those who feared a Doomsday-type scenario stemming from such collisions can rest easy, as we would all be dead at the moment if such a thing were to occur.

An article from British website The Register provided a great summary of the events, which are being hailed as a significant breakthrough by physicists around the world.

Shortly after 12:00 UK time, with both beams up and running at 3.5 TeV – several times any previous collision energies achieved – controls were cautiously tweaked to cross the two proton streams inside the detector arrays. Jubilant boffins packing the several control rooms involved cheered and clapped as the human race’s first seven TeV collisions appeared on the screens.

Those seven TeV collisions are what the LHC has been intended for all along. The unit, which is a staggering 27 km circular tunnel 500 or so feet beneath Switzerland, was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research and (according to Wikipedia, my go-to source for complicated things I don’t understand) is intended to prove a long-standing disagreement in the field of high energy physics. At the core of this contested theory is the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle, which apparently is sometimes called the “God” particle as well. I can’t help but think that whoever came up with that nickname was on a serious science trip at the time.

Far more interesting to me than the science behind it is the excitement with which the physicists of the world are reacting. This Twitter post by CERN (which is the acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research) expresses quite joyously the accomplishment. And understandably so. The $10 billion experiment is finally paying off, and there’s plenty of room for some seriously exciting physics coming from a result of this thing. A CNET United Kingdom article contains a priceless quote from one researcher, a quote that appeals to my science-fiction sensibilities and helps to sum-up what exactly is at stake here.

CERN particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti said, “With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson.”

The hunt begins. Take note. And bring my tinfoil hat.

Unfortuantely, Smarter can’t bring you gadgets like these. We can get you office machines, cheap computer servers, and discount hard drives!

This week we’ll be taking a look at some of the most interesting tech stories from the last few days (there was no shortage of exciting news from the realm of technology and gadgets). In an article on CNN.com, Internet analysis firm Experian Hitwise announced a new winner for top-traffic. The new king of the web? Social networking site Facebook, with 7.09% of all Internet traffic for the week ending March 13. Does this mark a significant change in the Internet landscape? It’s hard to tell for the time being, but it’s worth noting that over the last year, Facebook’s web traffic has gone up a staggering 135%.

Content-Aware Update to Photoshop

In an interesting YouTube video, Adobe Photoshop manager Bryan Hughes shows off what is an excellent new update to the much-used image editing software. While in the past, removing objects out of the background of pictures has been a tedious process, the new Content-Aware option uses some nifty technology to easily edit just about any picture. Â Check out the video for a great demonstration of this feature, it promises to make image manipulation easier than ever (which is a good thing, right?)

In case you didn’t catch it earlier, a 25 year old unemployed Frenchmen was arrested this week for hacking into several Twitter accounts, targeting several celebrity accounts (such as Brittney Spears) and even finding success with the account belonging to President Barrack Obama. There are some stiff legal repercussions ahead of him, as hacking in this type of context carries up to a two- year prison term in France, and it’s likely he will get the maximum sentence, given the political target of his crime. The kicker?

I am yet to be entirely convinced of the usefulness of Twitter. While I pretty willingly jumped on the bandwagon for previous social networking entities, the beauty of having a Myspace or a Facebook was that it enabled you to connect with people in a meaningful way (well, as meaningful as such connections get on the Internet). Twitter, with its limited-character postings and one-dimensional “following” relationships seemed more like a narcissist’s haven, a place where people could feel important because of their electronic soapboxes.

Yet still, there remain a large contingency of people out there who believe Twitter to be the next big thing, or perhaps even the current big thing for that matter. Every now and then, a situation rolls along , and people vigorously point at people “Tweeting” about critical current events and exclaim that the entire system is thereby justified for existing. This phenomenon was seen last summer during the Iranian Protests, when (as you can see in the linked article) protesters were able to communicate with people outside the country regarding the conditions on the ground in major cities like Tehran.

Now, following the horrendous earthquake in Haiti, Twitter-defenders are once again citing this disaster as a way to quickly spread news and calls for aid to a large, global audience. In this blog post from The Wall Street Journal, an increased in “tweets” regarding the earthquake has been cited as a means by which people are raising awareness, complete with celebrities encouraging their followers to donate to charities set up to relieve those devastated by the quake. Other Twitter activity included reactions to inflammatory comments made by Rev. Pat Robertson as well as the death of soul singer Teddy Pendergrassm.

I feel that people who are citing Twitter’s usefulness during this time of crisis are overstating the effect that it is actually having. First of all, Twitter boasts only 60 million accounts worldwide, and though this is a large number, we have to acknowledge that some of these accounts are not used with the same type of regularity as those cited in The Wall Street Journal article. That being said, the people who have received news of the quake through Twitter have also received word through the barrage of media coverage over the last several days. Seeing as Twitter is a resource used by only the most tech-savvy of people: it’s irrational to think a person who Tweeted about Haiti heard about the earthquake exclusively from Twitter.

This brings up the biggest glaring difference between the Iranian protests and the situation in Haiti. Because the quake destroyed so much infrastructure (infrastructure that sadly wasn’t sufficient in the first place), it is and will likely remain difficult for a person to have access to the Internet, or even cell service for that matter. This means that any and all Tweets regarding Haiti are coming from people who are “re-Tweeting” information about the crisis itself, as opposed to persons providing on-the-ground updates on the devastation. While rallying people to give financial backing to aid efforts is certainly an admirable cause, I have little patience for people who are using this natural disaster to raise Twitter up on a pedestal as being a ground-breaking source of information on the crisis as a whole. The real heroes are the people on the ground in Haiti, providing much-needed assistance to the beleaguered Haitians, not the people sitting behind their computers thousands of miles away offering support in 160 characters (or less).