It's now becoming common to kludge a conference "backchannel" onto Twitter. I am quite ambivalent about this. I don't think Twitter works nearly as well as an internal backchannel, even though there are some very nice and fancy twitter clients to help make this look nicer.

But the real problem comes from the public/private confusion. Tweets are (generally) public, and even if tagged by a hashtag to be seen by those tracking an event, they are also seen by your regular followers. This has the following consequences, good and bad.

• Some people tweet a lot while in a conference. They use it as a backchannel. That's overwhelming to their followers who are not at the conference, and it fills up the feed.
• When multiple people do it, it's almost like a spam. I believe that conferences like using Twitter as backchannel because it causes constant mentions of their conference to be broadcast out into the world.
• While you can filter out a hashtag in many twitter clients, it's work to do so, and the general flooding of the feed is annoying to many.
• People tweeting at a conference are never sure about who they are talking to. Some tweets will clearly be aimed at fellow conference attendees. But many are just repeats of salient lines said on stage, aimed only at the outsiders.
• While you can use multiple tags and filters to divide up different concurrent sessions of a conference, this doesn't work well.
• The interface on Twitter is kludged on, and poor.
• Twitter's 140 character limit is a burden on backchannel. Backchannel comments are inherently short, and no fixed limit is needed on them. Sure, sometimes you go longer but never much longer.
• The Twitter limit forces URLs to be put into URL shorteners, which obscure where they go and are generally a bane of the world.

Dedicated backchannels are better, I think. They don't reach the outside world unless the outsiders decide to subscribe to them, but I think that's a plus. I think the right answer is a dedicated, internal-only backchannel, combined with a minimal amount of tweeting to the public (not the meeting audience) for those who want to give their followers some snippets of the conferences their friends are going to. The public tweets may not use a hashtag at all, or a different one from the "official" backchannel as they are not meant for people at the conference.

The most common dedicated backchannel tool is IRC. While IRC has its flaws, it is much better at many things than any of the web applications I have seen for backchannel. It's faster and has a wide variety of clients available to use with it. While this is rarely done, it is also possible for conferences to put an IRC server on their own LAN so the backchannel is entirely local, and even keeps working when the connection to the outside world gets congested, as is common on conference LANs. I'm not saying IRC is ideal, but until something better comes along, it works. Due to the speed, IRC backchannels tend to be much more rapid fire, with dialog, jokes, questions and answers. Some might view this as a bug, and there are arguments that slowing things down is good, but Twitter is not the way to attain that.

However, we won't stop those who like to do it via Twitter. As noted, conferences like it because it spams the tweetsphere with mentions of their event.

I would love to see an IRC Bot designed to gateway with the Twitter world. Here are some of the features it might have.

It's over 17 years since I first too a stab at e-Books, and while I was far too early, I must admit I had not predicted I would be that early. The market is now seeing a range of e-Ink based electronic book readers, such as the kindle, and some reasonable adoption. But I don't have one yet. But I do read e-books on my tiny phone screen. Why?

Dave Winer recently made a call for an open source twitter shell, which he suggests be perhaps done with a javascript framework to let any site act like twitter.com. Many people are interested in this sort of suggestion, because while the folks at twitter.com are generally well loved and felt to be good actors, many people fear that no publishing system that becomes important should be controlled by just one company.

For success, such a system would need to be as easy to use and set up as twitter for users, and pretty easy to set up for server operators. One thing it can't do so easily, alas, is use a simple single namespace the way twitter does. A distributed system probably has to make names be domains, like E-mail addresses. That almost surely means something longer than twitter names and no use of the @name syntax popular in Twitter to refer to users. On the other hand almost everybody already has a domain based ID, ie. their E-mail address. On the other hand most people are afraid to use this ID in public where it might get spam. It's a shame, but many might well prefer to get a different ID from their E-mail, or of course to use one at twitter, which would now look like user@twitter.com to the outside world instead of @user within twitter.

Naming problems aside, the denizens of the internet are certainly up to building a publish/subscribe based short message multicasting service, which is what twitter is using terms much older than the company. I might propose the name MSM for the techology (Multicast Short Message)

Some recent searches have revealed unusual activity on twitter, and I wonder where it's going. Narcissus searches on twitter reveal a variety of accounts tweeting links into my blog and sites, for reasons not clearly apparent.

I just returned from Jeff Pulver's "140 Characters" conference in L.A. which was about Twitter. I asked many people if they get Twitter -- not if they understand how it's useful, but why it is such a hot item, and whether it deserves to be, with billion dollar valuations and many talking about it as the most important platform.

Some suggested Twitter is not as big as it appears, with a larger churn than expected and some plateau appearing in new users. Others think it is still shooting for the moon.

Twenty years ago (Monday) on June 8th, 1989, I did the public launch of ClariNet.com, my electronic newspaper business, which would be delivered using USENET protocols (there was no HTTP yet) over the internet.

ClariNet was the first company created to use the internet as its platform for business, and as such this event has a claim at being the birth of the "dot-com" concept which so affected the world in the two intervening decades. There are other definitions and other contenders which I discuss in the article below.

As you may know, I allow anonymous comments on this blog. Generally, when a blog is small, you don't want to do too much to discourage participation. Making people sign up for an account (particularly with email verification) is too much of a barrier when your comment volume is small. You can't allow raw posting these days because of spammers -- you need some sort of captcha or other proof-of-humanity -- but in most cases moderate readership sites can allow fairly easy participation.

As I move to get more paper out of my life, one thing I'm throwing away with more confidence is manuals. It's pretty frequent that I can do a search for product model numbers or other things on a manual, and find a place to download the PDF. Then I can toss the manual. I need to download the PDF, because the company might die and their web site might go away.

Some of you may know that I started a sub-blog for my thoughts on my favourite SF TV show, Battlestar Galactica. This sub-blog was dormant while the show was off the air, but it's started up again with new analysis as the first new episode of the final 10 (or 12) episodes airs tonight. (I will be missing watching it near-live as I will be giving a talk tonight on Robocars at the Future Salon in Palo Alto.) Reports are that one big mystery -- the last Cylon -- is revealed tonight.

NBC has had just a touch of coverage of Michael Phelps and his 8 gold medals, which in breaking Mark Spitz's 7 from 1972 has him declared the greatest Olympic athlete, or even athlete of all time. And there's no doubt he's one of the greatest swimmers of all time and this is an incredible accomplishment. Couch potato that I am, I can hardly criticise him.

If you run a web site of reasonable popularity, you probably get invitations to sign up for ad networks from time to time. They want you to try them out, and will sometimes talk a great talk about how well they will do.

I always tell them "put your money where your mouth is -- guarantee at least some basic minimum during the trial."

Most of them shut up when I ask for that, indicating they don't really believe their own message. I get enough that I wrote a page outlining what I want, and why I want it -- and why everybody should want it.

The last week saw some serious signs that Blu-Ray could win the high-def DVD war over HD-DVD. Many people have been waiting for somebody to win the war so that they don't end up buying a player and a video collection in the format that loses. (Strangely, the few players that supported both formats tended to cost much more than two individual players.)

A story from the New York Times suggests it costs over $12,000/year to store a movie in digital form.

The strike by screenwriters in the Porn Writers Guild of America is wreaking a less public havoc on the pornography industry. Porn writers, concerned about declining revenue from broadcast TV, also seek a greater share of revenue from the future growth areas of DVD and online sales.

"Online sales and DVD may one day be the prime sources of revenue in our industry," stated union spokesman Seymour Beaver. We want to be sure we get our fair share of that for providing the writing that makes this industry tick.

After going through the VHS to digital process, which I lamented earlier I started wondering about the state of digitizing old vinyl albums and tapes is.

There are a few turntable/cd-writer combinations out there, but like most people today, I'm interested in the convenience of compressed digital audio which means I don't want to burn to CDs at all, and nor would I want to burn to 70 minute CDs I have to change all the time just so I can compress later. But all this means I am probably not looking for audiophile quality, or I wouldn't be making MP3s at all. (I might be making FLACs or sampling at a high rate, I suppose.)

What I would want is convenience and low price. Because if I have to spend $500 I probably would be better off buying my favourite 500 tracks at online music stores, which is much more convenient. (And of course, there is the argument over whether I should have to re-buy music I already own, but that's another story. Some in the RIAA don't even think I should be able to digitize my vinyl.)

For around $100 you can also get a "USB turntable." I don't have one yet, but the low end ones are very simple -- a basic turntable with a USB sound chip in it. They just have you record into Audacity. Nothing very fancy. But I feel this is missing something.

Just as the VHS/DVD combo is able to make use of information like knowing the tape speed and length, detecting index marks and blank tape, so should our album recorder. It should have a simple sensor on the tone arm to see as it moves over the album (for example a disk on the axis of the arm with rings of very fine lines and an optical sensor.) It should be able to tell us when the album starts, when it ends, and also detect those 2-second long periods between tracks when the tone arm is suddenly moving inward much faster than it normally is. Because that's a far better way to break the album into tracks than silence detection. (Of course, you can also use CDDB/Freedb to get track lengths, but they are never perfect so the use of this, net data and silence detection should get you perfect track splits.) It would also detect skips and repeats this way.

At Supernova 2007, several of us engaged Andrew Keen over his controversial book "The Cult of the Amateur." I will admit to not yet having read the book. Reviews in the blogosphere are scathing, but of course the book is entirely critical of the blogosphere so that's not too unexpected.

I've written before about the problems with TV advertising. Recently I've been thinking more about the efficiency of various methods of advertising -- to the target, not to the advertiser. Almost all studies of advertising concern how effectively advertising turns into leads or sales, but rarely are the interests of the target of the ad considered directly.

The human voice is a pretty versatile instrument, and many skilled vocalists have been able to do convincing imitations of other sounds, and we've all heard "human beat box" artists work with a microphone to do great sounds.

That got me thinking, could we train a choir to work together to sound like anything, starting with violins, and perhaps even a piano or more?

If you've looked around, you probably noticed a high-def DVD player, be it HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, is expensive. Expect to pay $500 or so unless you get one bundled with a game console where they are subsidized.

Now they won't follow this suggestion, but the reality is they didn't need to make the move to these new DVD formats. Regular old DVD can actually handle pretty decent HDTV movies. Not as good as the new formats, but a lot better than plain DVD. I've seen videos with the latest codecs that pack a quite nice HD picture into 2.5 to 3 gigabytes for an hour. I've even seen it in less, down to 1.5 gigabytes (actually less that SD DVDs) at 720p 24 fps, though you do notice some problems. But it's still way better than a standard DVD. Even so, a dual layer DVD can bring about 9 gb, and a double sided dual layer DVD gives you 18gb if you are willing to flip the disk over to get at special features or the 2nd half of a very long movie. Or of course just do 2-disk sets.

Now you might feel that the DVD industry would not want to make a new slew of regular DVD players with the fancier chips in them able to do these mp4 codecs when something clearly better is around the corner. And if they did do this, it would delay adoption of whatever high def DVD format they are backing in the format wars. But in fact, these disks could have been readily playable already, with no change, for the millions who watch DVDs on laptops and media center PCs. More than will have HD DVD or Blu-Ray for some time to come, even with the boost the Playstation 3 gives to Blu-Ray.

When I watch SF TV shows, I often try to imagine a backstory that might make the story even better and SF like. My current favourite show is Battlestar Galactica, which is one of those shows where a deep mystery is slowly revealed to the audience.

So based on my own thoughts, and other ideas inspired from newsgroups, I've jotted down a backstory to explain the results you see in the show. Of course, much of it probably won't end up being true, but there are hints that some of it might.