Hart Van Denburg, writing for City Pages blog The Blotter, writes a really sweet mention of TwinCitiesTwitter. Van Denburg’s article got picked up by the University of Minnesota’s News Service (I’d link to it but it’s a Lyris archive page and wouldn’t work for anyone outside the University).
I don’t respond to many media inquiries—everyone can find what I have to say about most everything—here. But Van Denburg was irresistible. He asked just a few questions that were right on point and brought up the interesting point of aggregation value to outsiders.
First a few clarifications: I haven’t written 20 books about the internet. I’ve written 27 books on a wide variety of topics; three were about the internet but collectively sold more (many, many more) than all the others combined. Dave Winer is almost entirely responsible for TwinCitiesTwitter—I mostly just came along for the ride. Everybody forgets that Winer was responsible for really important software—ThinkTank, Ready, and MORE—long before the commercial internet was a gleam in anyone’s eye.
The reason I responded to Van Denburg’s query was because of his insight into the value of aggregation of geographically-local tweets—and their authors—to outsiders (politicians, advertisers, marketers). Yes, there’s tremendous value there for outsiders. No, I’m not interested in monetizing it. Winer might be, and that’s fine; it’s his code that makes TwinCitiesTwitter possible. It’s just kind of nice to have a few spaces on the internet that could be monetized not be.
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