What’s awkward for me is figuring out where something I write might appear later. For a while, I could use my blog as a scratchpad for ideas with a pretty good expectation that journalists would call me to talk about the ideas, not just grab quotes for stories. That changed a while ago, and I now write more carefully, and less often, on the blog. I’d thought of Twitter turning into that scratchpad, and was unsettled to see a tweet spread that quickly, widely and apparently authoritatively, especially since it wasn’t true about an hour after it was posted.

I don’t know that you and colleagues should be doing anything differently, but I think the shift in what media is and isn’t citeable is going to change how some of us talk online. That said, I’m not sure what spaces become unquoteable. If I’d posted the note on Facebook, would it have been citeable in the same way?

Like I said, I don’t have the answers, nor do I have any real objections. It’s just weird when you notice the ground shifting…

I was going to offer you a share of any future earnings I make as Berkman’s Michael Jackson Fellow. Unfortunately, based on your comment, we’re already being sued by his estate. I’ll send the bill for the Merc’s share.

I’ll out myself as the journalist at the Mercury News who saw your tweet reference above and passed it along to folks pulling together our coverage. This is an interesting response, and I think you raise several important ideas here.

As I was working on something else yesterday, I was struck by the flood of people who immediately reached for Twitter or Facebook to begin discussing, sharing and then mourning the news about MJ. It was interesting to see the news unfold in real time as people tried to figure out what had really happened, whether it was a joke, and when it had finally been confirmed. And I watched as Twitter’s trends became overwhelmed with MJ-related terms.

During all this, I saw your tweet. And because I know you a little, and recognize you as someone who tends to know what they’re talking about, I passed it along to a colleague. I’m not sure how the other news orgs came across it, whether they follow you, or whether they saw it on our sight. But in any case, it’s worth remembering that from the audience perspective, most of our readers only read the Mercury News. So it doesn’t matter to them that it appeared in several different places at the same time.

I’ve been using Twitter for about 18 months now, and as you suggested, I’ve long found it to be incredibly useful in getting a general sense of what folks are talking about. Rather than compare to Google, which I never would have used in such a way, I’d compare it to Facebook, which has been evolving to become more realtime. I was watching both yesterday, and Facebook’s recent changes have made it more useful for monitoring conversational streams (though still not to the same degree as Twitter).

As our resources have diminished in the newsroom, we’ve tried to think about ways to build or harness networks to help us extend our reach in different ways. Some of those have worked, and some have not. In the old says, (say, way back in the 90s), they would have sent me to the mall to get some “man on the street quotes” from regular folks. Now those folks are congregating in a different public arena, Twitter, and so we can get similar reaction there in greater volume and faster.

But then what? Should we have called you to see if your tweet was accurate? Ideally, yes. Should we run a correction? I’m not sure. I do think that in our diminished capacity, one valuable role we can still play for many readers is to filter such streams, help find the best or most interesting thoughts or tweets.

Of course, the other important thing we have to keep in mind is how unrepresentative most of these tools are and not draw broad conclusions about how large groups think or feel based on what I see on Twitter or Facebook.

In any case, enjoy your role as Berkman’s new Michael Jackson Fellow. Don’t let fame change you.

The uncertain part in my mind is the sequential IDs–there’s been a lot of speculation around how Twitter increments their ID #s. Here’s one of the better posts I’ve seen about it: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-many-users-does-twitter-have/

The hypothesis is that Twitter has at various times incremented by 1 and by 10. I’m not sure how this would affect your results, but something to consider.