Read Breaking Copy, a copywriting blog by Daryl Lang, the writer of History Eraser Button

“You have zero privacy… Get over it.” — Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems CEO, 1999

Take a minute and think about all the electronic data that exists about you.

The credit card company knows where I shop, and how often. The stores know which products I buy. The phone company has a record of all my travels—they know which celluar towers my phone is near, and I seldom go anywhere without my phone. The bank knows how often I get cash, how often I check my balance online, and at what times of day. Google knows which blogs I read and what I search for. My Internet provider and my employer, theoretically, can read every e-mail I write. Experian knows every addresses I’ve lived at since I was a kid. TransUnion knows where I’ve worked. Google Maps has a photo of my apartment on file for all to see. I still have copies of my academic records on my computer, and I bet my university has them backed up somewhere.

We haven’t even gotten to the stuff I voluntarily make public—my Twitter posts, my FaceBook profile, this blog, the stories I publish and the presentations I give as a journalist.

The New York Times Magazine has a story this week about what credit card mathematicians know about customers. Most companies are conservative about taking action based on what they know, but oh the things they know! Example: People who buy wild bird seed are likely to make their credit card payments on time.

Where does this lead? Under one scenario, companies or the government will gather as much information as they can and run it through complex algorithms to evaluate everyone. With every choice we make, we’ll have to think about how it would appear if examined by an outsider. Will buying a beer hurt my credit score? Life will be about cheezy, tedious, pointless rules: SAT prep or search engine optimization, but for real life. We’ll lose our freedom to be original.

But then there’s a second scenario, one that I think is more likely. For decades, banks and mortgage lenders have had access to credit scores and other predictive data about how people will spend money, and they still blew it. Hence the credit crisis. Company forecasts for 2009 have been wrong everywhere. Stock brokers, who trade in math and numbers, have lost heaps of money. The temptation to doubt statistics—and the fact that statistics can be manipulated and sometimes contradict each other—is too powerful.

Human nature means most of the data we collect is useless field of noise. Are we really to believe that we can process massive amounts of data and use it to predict human behavoir? Our digital record says a lot about us, but it still can’t predict what we’ll do next. We’re kind of random like that.

This Tom Tomorrow cartoon (a portion of which appears above) articulates how insulting the phrase “content provider” sounds to creative people. A stooge in the cartoon asks, “Who do these storytellers think they are, expecting to be paid for their so-called work?”

It’s not a small point. Today, Web sites refer to all the information they publish as “content.” Yet it’s a degrading word and it’s has caused a serious branding problem. “Content” is a commodity shoveled out of a grain silo. It evokes packaged cereals, where the only variance is the difference between Fruit Loops and Grape Nuts. No wonder consumers think anything published online is cheap and interchangeable!

This label has proven impossible to shake. Tribune newspapers are handing out new titles like “content editor” and “director of content.” WNBC recently changed the name of the newsroom to the “content center” (then, to their credit, changed it back). Once you start listening for content, you’ll hear it everywhere, like nails on a chalkboard. I don’t mean to over-inflate what I do for a living, but I don’t generate content. I write stories or articles, I edit videos, I create presentations. I acknowledge the word “content” when I’m in a meeting or dealing with internal communication, but only because I don’t want to sound out of step.

By the way, the “This Modern World” cartoon I linked to above? It was published in March 1997. The more things change…

If Twitter (the biggest fad in journalism) can teach us one thing, it’s that the newer something is, the more valuable it is. And the best way to make a 140-word news blast even more valuable is to slap the word URGENT on it.

In some ways, the URGENT craze can be traced to cable news stations. A few years ago, CNN discovered the marketing power of the phrase BREAKING NEWS, and began applying it to every story, even ones that aren’t especially important. Digging deeper into mass communications history, Twitter honors the writing format pioneered by the Associated Press for the telegraph. Correspondents were trained send the most important stuff first, as concisely as possible, and to fill in detail later.

In the last few days, we’ve seen Twitter take this to a whole other level. The culprit: Swine flu. Every middling swine flu update rises to the level of URGENT. If this continues, people will become stressed by a constant stream of noise that sounds like bad news (think post-9/11). Either that or the word “URGENT” will lose its power.

There’s the risk that an URGENT story that’s totally false could gain a lot of traction very quickly on Twitter and cause a panic. So far this hasn’t happened in a bad way, but I see it happening on a small level with business gossip.

The worst offender is the Twitter service Breaking News Online. @BreakingNews has a small staff that monitors the newswires and sends out a Tweet every time something is happening. As of this morning, 290,253 people on Twitter are following the account. They have more subscribers than The Baltimore Sun. I follow it so I don’t miss something everybody else knows.

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In a blog post that got a lot of attention today, a media thinker named Umair Haque proposed that The New York Times buy Twitter and use it to bolster its online news products.

It appears Haque put as much thought into this idea as I would if I were a consultant who wrote a blog on the side: Not much. His plan is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why I think so.

Let’s begin with a really important fact. Twitter and NYTimes.com don’t make money and there’s no evidence either one ever will. Just because you have a lot of useful data, a lot of traffic and a lot of customer engagement doesn’t mean you have a business. Twitter has tens of millions of members but no revenue. (The company says the money’s coming, just wait.) Traffic at NYTimes.com is huge—it’s the most popular newspaper site in America and growing. Yet digital business is still a mere sliver of The Times Company’s revenue—and it’s falling. Merging Twitter with The New York Times Company would unite two black holes into which cash vanishes.

(The New York Times Company’s best hope is that print advertising will come back roaring once the economy rights itself. Twitter’s best hope is that some profitable company will buy it for reasons of prestige and keep it running at a small loss. I’m rooting hard for both of those outcomes.)

From what I gather, Haque thinks Twitter’s value is in matching customers with companies, so the two sides can engage in a conversation. My, doesn’t that sound fun for everybody. Like a trip to the Post Office.

But I can’t fault Haque for tossing out a ludicrous idea on a business blog, because at least he made me think. On my commute home today, I kept thinking, What exactly is Twitter?

Of course it’s a virtual community of people. But what is it as a business? It’s a communication service, like a utility. Yet it offers no billable services, no advertising, no merchandise, no events, no product at all. Its software is simple and easily copied. Its database is valuable, but not valuable enough (so far) to command a price.

I kept trying to compare Twitter to some other enterprise. What’s something else that employs a skeleton staff (Twitter workforce: 29), earns no money, has virtually no valuable property, yet is consumed enthusiastically by tens of millions of people? I thought about celebrities, or popular music acts who don’t sell a lot of records, or political campaigns, or nonprofit organizations, or radio shows, or parks, or lighthouses, or drugs, or schools, or foods that doesn’t cost very much. But everything analogy I came up with falls apart. Not even other technology companies have achieved this level of success without a revenue engine behind them. (Even Wikipedia asks for donations.) In my limited scope of knowledge, there has never been a company in history like Twitter. Fascinating!

It’s easy to look at customer habits and conclude that newspapers are the past and Twitter is the future. But you’d be considering only part of the picture. Newspapers may be a dying business, but at least they’re a business.

1. All hail the triumph of the numbered list!
2. For some reason, curious readers can’t resist a series of facts boiled down into numbered sentences.
3. Editors who write magazine coverlines have understood the magnetic power of numbered lists for years. (See every Cosmopolitan cover ever.)
4. Recently, numbered lists reached a tipping point on the Internet. They’re everywhere.
5. As much as I like lists, creativity suffers under this format.
6. Blame lies with CPM advertising and Digg’s home page—a huge driver of impressions, and one that favors nifty lists. For example, a top story on Digg today is “Ten Fictional Movie Presidents that Rocked.” Digg is an exercise in headline writing. It’s no different than the cover of Cosmo.
7. Some businesses have sprouted that do nothing but post random lists of “50 best” or “100 best” things online and sell advertising around them. At some point, you’ve probably clicked on a link to such bottom feeders as OnlineBestColleges.com, Smashing Magazine and Free & Cool.
8. I don’t know how many lists of “## Best Photography Sites” my company’s site appears on, but it’s at least two.
9. I am also guilty of exploiting this phenomenon. Example: 20 Great Animal Portraits. It works, trust me.
10. Not everyone understands lists, however. Some lists are way longer than they need to be. Do you really want to read about 99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications? Of course not.
11. You know who’s the master of this format? Casey Kasem.
12. Also, David Letterman.
13. Also, people who write books of jokes for kids.
14. If I had the time, I’d start a site called “The Top 1,000 Numbered Lists on the Internet.”
15. This post isn’t really a list. It’s just a bunch of numbered paragraphs.

Last night I watched the leaked workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie that doesn’t open until May 1. The print appeared online around April 1, much to the dismay of 20th Century Fox, which has vowed to find the person responsible for leaking the file. I used a Web site called The Pirate Bay and a program called Limewire to find and download a Quicktime file; it took about four mouse clicks. Apparently it’s so easy to find a streaming version of the bootleg that one movie critic stumbled upon it by accident.

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I’m taking a four-day weekend for Easter. Last night I helped out with mics and sound at my church’s annual Good Friday Passion Play, which is one of our congregation’s favorite annual traditions.

Now it’s Saturday afternoon, and it’s dark out and rain is pelting my windows. I’m doing some work at my desk while I listen to the Fugees channel on Pandora. I just made some upgrades to my daryllang.com home page. This is a dynamically generated site, and it demands constant refinement. Coding reminds me of doing the crossword puzzle. I am concerned about my site’s reliance on Twitter, because it tends to fail more than it used to, but I’m not that concerned.

When I left the office Thursday for a long weekend, I promised myself I wouldn’t check my work e-mail during my days off. I lasted a day and a half. What if I were missing something interesting? My curiosity was just too powerful.

I’ve been thinking about my mission as a journalist, which is to learn important information and expediently transmit it to an audience. For the most part, that means talking to people who know more than I do. But I also have to monitor all sorts of data streams. In no particular order: Other publications, e-mail, SEC filings, communications from trade groups, court documents, incoming phone calls, message boards, Twitter, blogs and (yuck) blog comments. There are too many data streams and too much noise to keep track of it all. Society deals with this is by having mavens who are skilled at finding and communicating the important stuff. As an editor, I am one of those people.

The good news is we have more mavens monitoring these information streams than ever, and cooperating with one another. The more significant the information, the faster it travels and the wider its reach. Considering a classic example: If the president were shot, how long would it take for the news to reach 80 percent of Americans? Half an hour? Ten minutes? In my case (as an online editor for a niche business publication) very important news comes to me fast, from multiple sources, wherever I am. Boring news—Acme Widgets names a new CFO—comes in via e-mail and sits there.

I read a great quote in a recent New York Times story about the “social filter.” Increasingly, people rely on their friends to spot interesting news and pass it along, a process made much easier by the Internet. The quote is a second-hand observation from a researcher named Jane Buckingham, who heard a college student say it in a focus group:

“If the news is that important, it will find me.”

There’s something comforting about that statement. I can take a day off to help rig mics for church people singing songs in a play, and not worry that I’m going to be the last to know something.

There are problems with this method as well. Editing-by-democracy means simple, fun stories get more attention than important but complicated ones. Sometimes false information spreads fast, particularly in vague stories when there’s no correct information to knock it down. But through all history, humans have had an urge communicate with one another, and to get better at it. It’s a fascinating time to do what I do.

Earlier today I wrote a post on this blog about how great it is to have two Twitter feeds. As I pat myself on the back for being so clever and cool, I should probably acknowledge how wrong I was about Twitter exactly a year ago.

On April 8, 2008, readers of this blog saw these words:

“I may be wrong about Twitter, but I’m pretty sure it’s over. We’ve given it long enough. We’ve been patient. It’s not poised to break out of the nerd community. It’s not the next big thing.”

To see how wrong I was, take a look at this chart.

All the advice about Twitter from social networking experts could fill a book. (Aside: How do these experts make money? Anybody know?) Oh wait—it actually has filled a book. (So that’s how they make money!) For a messaging service that limits you to 140 characters, Twitter sure has spawned a lot of verbose experts. A strict science is evolving around Twitter, devoted to the universal goal of amassing and retaining the largest group of followers possible. There are rules.

I am not a fan of rules. So I have two Twitter feeds.

One is pdnonline, where I follow the rules. Technically this account is not really mine. I created this account for my company, and it’s the voice of the magazine where I work. However, I write all of it. I try very hard to keep it useful, interesting and on-topic. I promote it ceaselessly. And it works! We have more than 2,600 followers and growing.

My other Twitter feed is daryllang, which is mirrored as my Facebook status update and appears in the headline feed on my home page. I don’t follow any rules with it, and I don’t care. I have abandoned any misguided notion that Twitter skills will help my career. (Confidential to fellow journalists: The sooner you realize this, the better.) The only reason to post on my personal Twitter account is for fun, and when it stops being fun, I stop doing it. I have a paltry 117 followers on my daryllang account. I think that’s perfect.

NEW YORK, N.Y. April 1, 2009 — Bowing to pressure from technology companies, major currency exchanges announced today that they will recognize the Impression as a form of money.

Google, Facebook and numerous media companies were expected to immediately switch their accounting systems to Impressions.

“We believe recording Impressions, rather than traditional accounting, is a true measure of our business performance,” said Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL. “Also, effective immediately, we will begin paying our employees and suppliers by driving them Impressions, rather than writing them checks in U.S. dollars.”

Since the Web 2.0 boom began in 2006, programmers, designers, bloggers, writers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers and other content creators have been gradually transitioning to an Impression-based economy. That is, the only payment they earn for their services is massive amounts of viewers visiting the Web sites they create.

“Under the economic model we pioneered, we generate Impressions by aggregating content, and we compensate the content providers by driving traffic to them,” said Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington. “The audience dictates whether work is valuable. What could be more democratic?”

Huffington also noted that the new model sidesteps the old-fashioned problems of contracts, taxes and labor relations, since no money ever changes hands.

Through a process known as “linking back,” a site that amasses a wealth of Impressions can drive traffic to other sites, continuing the cycle. A thriving economy has emerged in trading Impressions, but until now it has been difficult, and in some cases impossible, to convert Impressions into any other currency. Some bloggers reported that despite generating thousands of Impressions for their work, they were earning less than $1 a day in advertising revenue, barely enough to pay for the electricity that powers their computers.

Some economists warn that the popularity of free Internet content will lead to rapid Impression inflation. “Web sites can effectively mint impressions,” cautioned New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in a Twitter update that almost instantly generated 250,000 Impressions.

Wired editor-in-chief and leading Internet thinker Chris Anderson said the new Impression-based economy will yield rich dividends, including a limitless supply of free information available to everyone everywhere. Under the “freemium” business model Anderson has advanced, the economy was already on track to converting Impressions into dollars organically. “Declaring Impressions are a new currency is only formalizing an inevitable shift in the economy,” Anderson said. “Just give it time. Yes, more time. I don’t know, a few more years? After the recession! Gimme a break here!”

Some naysayers note that workers are still unable to exchange Impressions for goods and services, leading many media employees to move back in with their parents or eat nothing but Cheerios and ramen noodles.