16th
Wherein I disclose my sources.
With sooo much going on in the world, it can help to have more eyes on the news, so i’m going to reveal some of my hitherto closely held news gathering sources in no particular order…
Twitter is a rumor generation and persistence machine. It’s utility is only as good as the social network you’ve worked to develop. I rarely post there. my socnet is from 3years ago, and is mainly news and politics oriented. As such, i view it as a siesmograph of what one consistent group of contacts finds important. @karoli is my main politics source. she’s all over it with a middle-left perspective. @breakingnews is finally worthwhile to follow now that a bigger news agency took it over and they give a source so you can google and verify yourself. you MUST verify anything you see on twitter. The people worth following include the links for you.
I don’t post links there out of paranoia and it still amazes me that people with oppressive governments do. First, because it uses bit.ly to tinyurl. and if you add the + sign to the end of a bitly url, you see everyone on twitter that has posted that link (even if they used another shortener or none at all) so all a country like Iran needs to do is put an anti-gov post out there and see who passes it along. Second, it’s really easy for a govt to simply block the site and cut off communication.
Identi.ca and it’s wide network of decentralized yet interconnected sites is much better, and that’s where i’m active. it’s much more social, with threaded conversations and groups. almost impossible to block, because you can just re-route by using another server and still get your message out. The smarter Iranians have moved there. OStatus is an open standard being used that lets me subscribe to some blogs, people on Buzz, etc. And i trust them. run by Spock Mountain Research folk. it will be much more useful once people get a clue and move there in greater numbers. In the meantime it’s the go-to place for all thing related to internet freedom.
Friendfeed is interesting. most people use it as a cloud backup, so their twitter or other cloud contributions like flickr get collated there, if people set it up that way. it has two big things going for it. the first is groups. I’m subbed to a lot of science related groups and get fantastic info there. the second is their search. This is HUGE. you can enter any search term or combo and see live updates of any hits. you don’t even need an account to do this. for example: the search for Nuclear is dizzying. You’ll need to pause often, and realize lots of this is from unreliable twitter and much is repeat of older news as people find out about it and forward it to their friends.
More later at this location. too much going on in the world…
