So you’re on Twitter. You know what a hashtag is; you can squeeze any message into 140 characters. You’re a veteran.

But do you know about the battle between the adapters and the preservers? Can you identify an “ego retweet” when you see one? Have you thought about the intellectual-property implications of the letters “RT”?

Three researchers — social media guru danah boyd, Cornell sociology grad student Scott Golder, and artist Gilad Lotan — have written an academic paper that hits on all those topics while examining an issue at the core of Twitter’s social nature: How and why do people retweet? Their draft, entitled “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter” is available on boyd’s site and open to public commentary. “We’ve gotten numerous comments and emails from people who have enjoyed reading the paper,” Golder told me over email, “and many of them have shared their own personal reflections on retweeting.”

The authors examined a random sample of 720,000 tweets from between January 26 and June 13 and found that about three percent of all tweets are retweets — that is, they are primarily a repeat of another Twitter user’s message. “We are studying Twitter in a variety of contexts,” Golder said. “In particular, we are trying to initially simply map out what’s going on, document people’s practices and get an understanding of how people are actually using it and what they’re using it for.”

Here are some of their findings: Keep reading »

Despite the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, wasn’t released until this week, it has still managed to generate much pre-publication discussion about the future of the digital economy. Anderson found himself enmeshed in a pre-publication plagiarism scandal two weeks ago when the Virginia Quarterly Review found that some passages in the book directly matched Wikipedia entries. (Anderson quickly apologized, blaming inaccurate citing and overall carelessness.)

Then, of course, there’s the actual content of the book, which has been received by journalists and business-minded folks in decidedly polarizing ways. Malcolm Gladwell unleashed a scathing review of Free in last week’s New Yorker, scolding Anderson for adhering to the freeconomy as an “iron law” and writing, “The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.” (Plenty of responses followed.)

But for Anderson, Free is indeed the ultimate destiny of our economy. “Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or compete with Free, one way or another,” he writes in the beginning of the book. This assertion will probably look depressingly familiar to journalists who’ve watched their traditional business models fall apart in the wild west of the web, where “free” is the gold standard. Keep reading »

Citizen journalism further came of age this week as regular citizens using tools like Twitter and Facebook out-reported much of the mainstream media, keeping the world riveted with news and photos pouring out of Iran. It seems particularly appropriate, then, that the Knight News Challenge also announced its grant recipients this week. Many of the platforms developed for the Challenge are aimed at helping citizens report and aggregate news content.

One winner in particular, Ory Okolloh, has cultivated a platform specifically designed to technologically aid citizens in the collection of local news. Her site, Ushahidi — Swahili for “testimony” — seeks to empower people in disenfranchised regions who frequently lack the resources to report on the atrocities occurring in their areas.

Billed as a way to “crowdsource crisis information,” the site culls reports from cell phones, email and the internet and, using a Google Maps mashup tool, visually displays them on a map. Ushahidi was originally developed to visually display the crises occurring in post-election Kenya, and the results proved so successful that Okolloh has since extended the project’s reach to other nations, including South Africa, India and the eastern Congo.

I spoke with Okolloh over e-mail about Ushahidi, and below is the edited transcript of that interview. Keep reading »