BusinessWeek is twittering a story about Twitter...

[Andrew]

Starting today at 2:30 p.m. EST Steve Baker of BusinessWeek will be writing a story about Twitter on Twitter. More details here: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2008/0...

Might be interesting for the group to check out.

[Brad King]

That is fascinating. It's going to be interesting to see how companies begin to use these types of service to change the way we tell stories -- if we're actually changing the storytelling process at all.

--SNIP
The idea of writing in this format is to turn Twitter into something of an editorial wiki. I’ll write a 140-letter chunk and wait an hour. Meanwhile, people can correct my chunks or write what they think should be the next one. Maybe some of those chunks will supplant my own. Eventually, I’m hoping, we’ll publish the whole thing as a core story that spouts all sorts of Twittery arms and legs—each one a sign of a direction it could have taken. In fact, maybe some of those legs can turn into other, parallel stories.
--SNIP

[Kevin Dugan]

The end result will be interesting. Some feel the wisdom of crowds does not work. But the challenge I think Stephen Baker is already finding is compiling all of the tweets, sorting them and analyzing them. It could be like getting an interview transcribed but someone jumbles the transcript.

Either way I think Twitter is impacting commmunications as a whole...mixing the pros of blogging and IM. For me the real value has been taking the conversation from online to offline and actually meeting some of you.

[Andrew]

Interesting discussion on whether Twitter is outshining mainstream media at ReadWriteWeb. Excerpt: The only thing Twitter does better than the traditional news is speed. It doesn't do depth, it doesn't do fact-checking, it doesn't do real reporting. It does breaking news, and it does that very well -- in many cases these days better than the mainstream press (in terms of how fast it breaks news).

[Brad King]

I agree with both of you -- Twitter is the classic fire hose problem (or as David says, scalable issues), but for me, that's just a function of finding a way to parse the streams. The explosion of media was only a problem until RSS feeds and readers came along. Now, I can read hundreds of news sources in one sitting.

The art of headline and dek writing is more a premium today -- and god forbid you don't include some text in your feed so I can scan it.

Imagine a parsing program with Twitter that lets you auto-separate (like hashtags, which are kludey) based on keywords. You could have a series of feeds that give you 1) breaking news (the key driver for all news sites), 2) sources (the key driver for all reporters and 3) a real-time look at the changing news.

With that parsed feed, once your story is up -- the Twitter-sphere could easily serve as an RSS update.

Just a thought on what that may look like.

[Brad King]

And here's Baker's story (or stories)

Why Twitter Matters (edited version)

The Twitter story I've been working on (long version)